Cooked Roads, Cracked Surfaces: Why This Summer's Heatwaves Could Mean a Bumpier Winter Ahead

If you've felt like your car has been jolting over more cracks and craters than usual this year, you're not imagining it. According to a fresh warning from the RAC, reported by the Guardian, the UK's punishing run of summer heatwaves has left road surfaces more vulnerable to cracking, setting the stage for a fresh wave of potholes as the weather turns. It's a reminder that pothole season isn't just a winter phenomenon anymore. The damage is being done right now, under our tyres, in the heat of summer.

What Happened

The RAC's warning centres on a straightforward but often overlooked fact: extreme heat is bad for roads. As the Guardian reports, the breakdown organisation says that the intense summer temperatures the UK has experienced have made road surfaces more prone to cracking. That cracking doesn't necessarily show up immediately as a fully formed pothole. Instead, it creates weak points, tiny fissures and fractures in the asphalt that sit quietly until the next heavy rain or frost gets to work on them. The RAC's message is essentially a forecast: expect the pothole problem to get worse, not better, in the months ahead.

This isn't the first time weather extremes have been linked to the state of Britain's roads. Cold snaps and freeze-thaw cycles have long been blamed for pothole surges each spring. What's notable here is the recognition that scorching summers can be just as damaging, just through a different mechanism, and that the two extremes can compound each other over a single year.

Why It Matters

To understand why a heatwave can wreck a road surface, it helps to think about what asphalt actually is. Road surfaces are typically made from bitumen mixed with aggregate, a combination designed to flex slightly under load and temperature changes. But that flexibility has limits. In very high temperatures, bitumen can soften and expand. When surfaces expand unevenly, or when a road that's baked hard all day is suddenly hit by a downpour, cools rapidly, or is compressed by heavy traffic while still soft, tiny stress fractures can form.

Those fractures are the beginning of the pothole story. On their own, they might look like nothing more than surface crazing. But once autumn and winter arrive, with heavier rainfall and the return of overnight frosts, water gets into those cracks. When it freezes, it expands, forcing the crack wider. Repeated freeze-thaw cycles turn a hairline fracture into a chunk of missing road surface within a matter of weeks. In other words, this summer's heat may not have created many visible potholes yet, but it may well have loaded the gun for the coming winter.

This matters for several reasons beyond the obvious inconvenience of a bumpy ride. Potholes are a genuine road safety hazard, capable of causing tyre blowouts, wheel and suspension damage, and loss of control, particularly for cyclists and motorcyclists who have far less protection than someone in a car. They also represent a significant financial burden, both for local authorities who must repair them and for drivers who end up footing repair bills when their car takes a hit. Council road maintenance budgets are already stretched thin, and a problem that arrives from two directions, summer heat damage layered on top of the usual winter freeze-thaw cycle, only adds pressure to a maintenance backlog that has been building for years. Our earlier look at the scale of that backlog, in the £16bn pothole repair backlog, gives a sense of just how far behind councils already are before you even factor in an extra season of heat-related wear.

The Legal Angle: Who Is Responsible When a Pothole Damages Your Car?

Many drivers don't realise that local authorities have a legal duty to maintain the roads they're responsible for. Under Section 41 of the Highways Act 1980, highway authorities (generally the relevant council, or National Highways for motorways and major A-roads) must maintain highways that are "maintainable at public expense." This duty has been interpreted by the courts to include keeping the road surface in a reasonable state of repair, which is the legal hook that allows drivers to claim compensation when a pothole damages their vehicle.

However, this duty is not absolute, and councils have a recognised defence under Section 58 of the same Act. If a council can show it had a reasonable system of inspection and maintenance in place, and that it didn't know (and couldn't reasonably have been expected to know) about the specific defect before the damage occurred, it can avoid liability even if a genuine pothole did cause the damage. This is why councils place such emphasis on inspection logs and reporting histories when a compensation claim comes in. If a pothole had already been reported and simply hadn't been fixed in time, that tends to strengthen a driver's claim considerably. If it appeared suddenly, with no prior reports, the council has more room to argue the defect wasn't reasonably foreseeable.

This legal framework becomes especially relevant in a scenario like the one the RAC is describing. If heatwave-related cracking genuinely accelerates deterioration, and councils haven't adjusted their inspection frequency to account for it, there's an argument that authorities should be treating summer heat damage as seriously as they treat winter frost damage when planning inspections. Whether that translates into successful claims in individual cases will always depend on the specific facts, the state of the road, when it was last inspected, and what records exist.

It's worth being clear that pursuing a compensation claim for pothole damage is very case-specific, and while the legal principles above are well established, whether a particular claim succeeds depends on evidence and circumstances that a general article like this one simply can't assess. Anyone considering a claim for significant vehicle damage should look at the relevant council's official process and, for anything beyond a straightforward small claim, consider seeking independent advice.

What Drivers Should Know

There are practical steps every driver can take, both to reduce the risk of pothole damage and to protect themselves if the worst happens.

Report what you see. Every council has a system for reporting potholes, and the national www.gov.uk pothole reporting tool routes reports to the correct local authority. Reporting a defect not only helps get it fixed, it also creates an official record that can matter later, both for your own potential claim and for holding councils to their maintenance duties more broadly.

Check your tyre pressures regularly. Under-inflated tyres are far more vulnerable to sidewall damage and blowouts when they hit a pothole, because there's less air cushioning the impact. This is a simple, free check that meaningfully reduces your risk.

Keep a safe following distance. It sounds basic, but tailgating means you can't see and react to a pothole hidden by the car in front until it's too late. Leaving space gives you time to spot and, where safe, steer around defects.

Know your speed limits and road conditions. Potholes are more dangerous, and more damaging, at higher speeds. On roads you know to be poorly maintained, a slightly more cautious approach can save you an expensive repair bill.

Document everything if you're hit. If a pothole does cause damage, take photos of the defect (including something for scale, such as a coin or a shoe), note the exact location, get the date and time, and try to establish whether it had been there for a while. Keep your repair invoices and any correspondence with garages, as these will form the backbone of any claim.

Check whether it's already been reported. Many councils now have online systems showing reported and logged defects. If your local highways authority already knew about the pothole that damaged your car, this significantly strengthens your position.

Looking Ahead

The RAC's warning is really a heads-up rather than a one-off news event. It suggests that the pothole problem drivers have grown used to complaining about each spring may increasingly be a year-round story, with summer heat and winter frost working together rather than in isolation. For councils already managing tight budgets and long repair backlogs, that's an unwelcome complication. For drivers, it's a reminder that vigilance doesn't have a season. The tyre-jarring crater you hit in November may well have started life as an invisible hairline crack baked into the tarmac back in July.

As extreme weather becomes more frequent rather than less, questions about how roads are built, inspected, and funded are only going to become more pressing. Until councils adapt their maintenance strategies to reflect a climate that stresses roads from both ends of the thermometer, drivers would be wise to assume the problem is getting worse, not better, and to plan their driving, their vehicle checks, and their reporting habits accordingly.