00:00A veteran mechanic can gauge a tire's quality simply by touch and even smell.
00:05The feel of the rubber's softness, the texture of the treads, and the scent of the compound
00:10can reveal the tire's age and authenticity, skills that come only with years of experience.
00:17Workshop owners are now urging motorists to be cautious when buying tires,
00:21following reports of date tampering and possible counterfeiting.
00:25Seventy-year-old mechanic Xiao Jin-tik, who has run a tire shop for more than five decades,
00:31said that experienced hands can immediately tell when a tire is old or of poor quality.
00:37New tires, he explained, typically have a softer rubber feel,
00:42while those that have been stored for too long or had their sidewall dates altered
00:46can be easily identified through touch.
00:50He emphasized that all his stock comes directly from authorized distributors
00:54and warned consumers to be wary of workshops, offering prices that seem unusually low,
01:00noting that tires are a vehicle's only contact with the road
01:03and compromising on quality could be dangerous.
01:06The warnings follow the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission's launch of Opsgrip earlier this month
01:23in collaboration with eight major tire manufacturers and enforcement agencies.
01:28The raids uncovered imported tires sold through unauthorized distributors,
01:33labels that had been tampered with to conceal their country of origin,
01:37and manufacturing dates altered to make old stock appear new.
01:41As part of the ongoing investigation,
01:43several company and personal bank accounts worth about 70 million ringgit have been frozen.
01:48had a low- seats outside by 30 millionring�ē tune in an mindset to be held late for 2014,
01:51with the
02:11co-operating
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