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Kick the Tires

 

Kick the Tires 


Meaning:

Kick the Tires means to check for good quality, to be diligent and check every angle. 

“Did you kick the tires?”


Origin:

This phrase has had a lot of references about where it started, but no one knows for sure. I have heard it was from unethical wagon wheel dealers a long time ago who would sell wheels that had rotten wood on the axles, so any buyer should kick the wagon wheel, It was also said that Kicking tires were a way to vent in the early years of motoring when tires would often go flat and delay your journey, or that the rubber from tires was very thin on cheap cars and kicking it was a way to see if you had a good car, and the other idea of where this phrase started was that derived from Latin, E tira kikium, which means "a kick for good luck."

The first written history that I can find was from 1929, in the publication Marketing Used Cars, it reads:

"If the dealer or his used car manager goes out to the car, he may kick the tires as though he expected them to collapse at the force of the blow."


Example:


Today we still see this term and action being performed of kicking tires. You might see some people kicking the tires while buying a car , but it is probably going to be used as a saying instead, it means that all possible things that could go wrong have been tested. An example sentence is:

“We should hire a few interns to kick the tires on this app before we release it to the public.”





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