Why Britain's £14 billion pothole crisis isn't only a headache for drivers

I knew the left-front tyre was punctured well before the Porsche’s TPMS (Tyre Pressure Monitoring System) registered a drop in pressure; the sickening impact of a jagged pothole lurking beneath deep standing water left no doubt as to the fate of the low-profile Pirelli’s now ruptured sidewall.

Fortunately for me the Cayenne Turbo S Hybrid was a press car, so after an apologetic call to the ever-helpful press office the stricken SUV was collected from my house. If it had been my own it would have been a major disruption, not to mention a serious expense. Like most new cars, the Cayenne didn’t have a 21-inch spare in the boot, or indeed a space saver. Puncture-repair mousse isn’t designed to seal major breaches in a tyre’s carcass, so it would have been a job for my nearest Porsche dealer. Besides which, I’d want them to check the wheel and suspension for further damage.

> Ill-conceived government legislation will kill the UK car industry

It transpired it was ‘just’ the tyre (£280-worth) that sustained damage, but this was only because I was on a narrow country lane doing less than 30mph. Elsewhere on Northamptonshire’s increasingly ruined road network it could have been a different and far more expensive story. It’s a sorry and all-too-familiar tale.

If you’re one of evo’s many overseas readers you’re probably wondering why we Brits expend so much energy moaning about potholes. Especially when the UK’s roads already have a long-established reputation for being rougher and more demanding than those of most of our northern European neighbours. Well, all I can say is in the last year or so, my own experiences and wider anecdotal evidence suggest they have deteriorated at an exponential rate. Wince-inducing impacts are now daily occurrences, with punctures, buckled wheels or worse frighteningly commonplace.

Depressingly, it’s a scenario we’d better get used to, because the problem has been allowed to run away with itself to such an extent our local councils are unable to keep up with the overwhelming number of temporary patch repairs, let alone protect and maintain the underlying integrity of the road network.

In Northamptonshire it seems the favourite ‘fix’ is to drop an orange road cone in the hole. I’m not sure if this is to offer some kind of warning to hapless road users, or provide a makeshift gauge rod for the council’s road menders; only if the cone disappears into the gaping maw does the pothole require filling.

Of growing concern are the number of large potholes that seem to be opening up on main A-roads and even motorways after the freeze-thaw effects of winter. I’ve hit a few that only by some miracle didn’t burst a tyre or bend a wishbone. I dread to think what would happen to a motorcycle. It’s no better for cyclists attempting to navigate our minor roads.

According to UK road builders’ trade body, the Asphalt Industry Alliance, one in every nine miles of local road is categorised as being in ‘poor condition’, which means it’s likely to require significant maintenance (not just pothole filling) in the next 12 months. As for the cost, well, simply filling the nation’s potholes would cost an estimated £14 billion.

But don’t worry, because the government has pledged to keep us motorists sweet with an extra one-off payment of £200 million to top up the woefully inadequate £5 billion that was allocated to the maintenance of local highways from 2020 to 2025. Meanwhile that mother of all infrastructural sinkholes, the HS2 rail link, is predicted to swallow £100 billion before its long-delayed completion in 2041. Of course, by this time we won’t need a high-speed train to anywhere because we’ll all be in the fresh hell known as the metaverse. Wherever that is.

The UK’s rapidly deteriorating roads pose a more immediate and insidious threat to our fast car futures. Worryingly it’s one that’s even harder to fix than the plague of potholes; namely how much longer can we expect car manufacturers to give any consideration to finding UK-compatible chassis tunes?

evo has always preferred to describe overseas first-drive verdicts as provisional and only come to a definitive star rating once we’ve driven the same car on UK roads. Historically that’s not been due to a shameful state of disrepair, but because the surface dressings are coarser and the way our favourite UK driving roads duck and dive across the topography has an unfailing knack of tying less than perfectly suspended cars in knots.

The very best cars have always managed to combine tight high-speed body control with fluidity and low-speed pliancy, but it’s a balance fewer and fewer cars seem to strike when driven in the UK. Finding that sweet spot is something British ride and handling engineers tend to sweat over more than most, but it can’t be long before our cratered tarmac is a lost cause even to them. Maybe the 911 Dakar and Huracán Sterrato aren’t so daft after all...

This story was first featured in evo issue 309.