My mother has a 2009 colt Cz2, nearing 50k miles. Recently all 4 wheels have had they're tyres replaced due to flats within the last 4 months. The tyre garage have said that the alloys chip and flake and break the seal. The cars never been driven on harsh roads or agressively, I'm just a bit confused about how they've all gone recently. Anyone else had any experience with this? May be a pure coincidence but I'm open to suggestions haha.

It does happen, usually on old alloys, five years isn't so good. The paint gets oxidised so is no longer smooth enough to make a proper seal with the tyre. The fact that all four have gone at a similar time points to this issue. Could be a manufacturing defect that took this long to surface.

My mazda was the same, although I didn't have flats because of it, they just looked horrible. It happens to most Asian cars or mazda, hyundai/Kia, honda etc. Supposidely it's because the Japanese etc don't use salt on their roads whereas we do so it eats away at the alloys. I ended up fitting a brand new set of wheels on mine last year.

You can get them refurb'd and hopefully it won't happan again as they'll use proper stuff to harden them up.