Most people look at the tread and think just because it has a lot of wear left that it's ok. Not so, the age of the tire is what is most important. One age crack's start to flex a tire can come apart just like you have shown. Most of the time it will happen at speed and that can turn into a real problem.
My 91 parts chaser...1/4 million miles on it... has ORIGINAL tire on it !! No kidd'in.... (Spare has never been on the ground...too aggravating to drop it down.) 6sally6
Is the fact the tire is old the only reason for thinking that's why it failed? Tires fail for a lot of reasons, I've had more 'new' tire failures than any that could be attributed to age. Are you sure you didn't run over something unnoticed? Maybe hit one too many potholes and damaged the tire? Was the tire rated for the load on it? Remember, that rating is given at maximum inflation pressure, reduce the pressure and the rating goes down. One thing I have noticed is that radials do come apart more when they do go flat suddenly at speed, much more so than bias-ply. I read the full draft report that the NHTSA put out after the Ford/Firestone debacle which is where this 'tire expiration' came from. The final report had a lot of info edited out. First, this was only a 'recommendation' with no legal authority (and still is most places), the tire retailers (and manufacturers in the background) are the ones that pushed this, primarily to avoid legal liability on the manufacturers part and to generate easy tire sales for both. The NHTSA also checked three years of US accident reports for all fifty states. They admitted that they were unable to find even ONE documentable case of an 'aged' tire being the sole cause of an accident. Road hazards and underinflation were the top two problems. 300 million tires were shipped just in the US last year between cars and light trucks. If just 1% of that total represented replacing 'aged' tires, you would think that aged tire failures would be epidemic yet all you ever seem to see are these antidotal stories breathlessly told. We here as a group probably some of the worst offenders out there, yet this only generates at most a handful of stories here each year... with age blamed when other issues may have been the cause. Now I'll admit that 26 years is no doubt pushing the envelope some. But to be honest, I don't see any of the typical issues that genuinely 'aged' tires exhibit on the OPs tire. Lots of tread left, no checking or cracking. So, was it age? Maybe... but it could have been something else just as easily.
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