Firestone Still Under Pressure Despite Its Tire Recall
The massive Bridgestone/Firestone recall in the wake of nearly 300 traffic accidents and 46 deaths linked to disintegrating tire treads failed Thursday to relieve pressure on the beleaguered tire maker and its automotive partner Ford Motor Co.
And even as product safety experts said that tires are generally among the least problematic of car parts, worried consumers continued to jam tire stores around the country to seek answers to their questions.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is expected to release 1,700 pages of Firestone tire-related documents in Washington today. They are part of a package of 8,000 pages of paperwork NHTSA has requested from Bridgestone/Firestone and Ford as the agency intensifies its investigation into the tire failures.
The recall affects 6.5 million 15-inch Firestone ATX, ATX II and Wilderness AT brand tires, all bearing the size designation P235/75R15. Many were fitted as original equipment on some Ford, Mercury and Mazda sport-utility vehicles and pickup trucks since 1991; others have been installed on a variety of vehicles as replacement tires.
In key developments Thursday:
* Bridgestone/Firestone, a unit of Japan’s Bridgestone Corp., said it will take a $350-million charge this year to account for costs of the recall. In Tokyo trading, anxious investors sent the company’s shares to their lowest level since September 1996.
* Ford announced a media campaign, including full-page ads in national newspapers starting today, to give consumers step-by-step instructions on how to determine whether their tires are subject to the recall.
* The attorney general of South Carolina demanded that his state be included in the first of three phases of the recall in the coming year and his insistence is likely to touch off similar requests by officials in other states.
In announcing the recall Wednesday, Bridgestone/Firestone said that because it appears that hot weather plays a role in the tire failures, it would replace tires for customers in California, Arizona, Texas and Florida first.
“If that tire is unsafe in Florida . . . then how can you say it can’t be replaced in South Carolina until next summer?” South Carolina Atty. Gen. Charlie Condon said.
* Ford acknowledged for the first time that there are high-end Explorers in the U.S., particularly the Eddie Bauer model, equipped with 16-inch Firestone Wilderness ATs that are not being recalled but are the same size and brand that Ford voluntarily replaced last year on thousands of SUVs sold in the Persian Gulf and Latin America.
Ford spokesman Mike Vaughn said Thursday that Ford and Firestone had examined accident reports involving U.S. vehicles fitted with the 16-inch tires and determined there were not enough incidents to warrant including them in the recall of the 15-inch tires.
The information was disclosed in a document provided to The Times by Virginia-based Strategic Safety, an automotive defect investigations firm that helped launch the Firestone probe.
Ford has been criticized for not acting in the U.S. at the same time it was replacing the overseas tires, which were also linked to accidents caused by rapid tire deterioration.
The recall and its reverberations have made the automobile tire the central player in one of the most significant product safety investigations in recent years.
But despite the growing concern, product safety and tire industry specialists say there is little fear that all tires are flawed.
Even Sean Kane, the safety investigator who helped open up the Firestone probe, notes that the current recall is an anomaly. There have been very few tire defect investigations and most tire recalls are very small, involving a few thousand tires at most, said Kane, president of Strategic Safety.
He and others aren’t giving the tire industry an unqualified endorsement, though. They can’t--because there is little hard data about tire-related accidents.
In part that’s because the tire industry has little incentive to collect such information, Kane said. When a motorist takes a blown-out tire to the local tire dealer, “nine times out of 10 they are going to say it was a road hazard,” so the blowout won’t be logged as a defective tire for which the maker will have to pay.
And NHTSA, the government’s official keeper of automotive defect and safety findings, logs tire data only when consumers complain--as in the Firestone case--or when the investigating police officer in a traffic fatality bothers to note on the report that a tire was involved.
In 1998, when the agency counted 37,081 fatal traffic crashes that resulted in 41,471 deaths nationally, “flat tire” was checked on just 173 of the reports as a driver-related factor, a NHTSA spokeswoman said. She cautioned that the mere presence of a flat tire does not mean the tire was the cause of, or even a contributor to, the accident.
Still, the scant number of times a tire problem was noted seems to support the auto and tire industries’ claims that, by and large, tires are fairly safe.
It wasn’t always that way, said Brook Lindbert, director of tire and wheel systems for General Motors Corp.
“Thirty years ago we were in the era of bias-ply tires, and tires then were pretty short-lived,” he said. “They had poor resistance to road hazards, poor fuel economy” and traction wasn’t all that great, either.
“Now, with radials and much better material” used in tire construction, thanks to advances in metallurgy, synthetic fabrics and rubber compounds--all prime components of tire construction--the rubber that really is all that comes between the motorist and the road is a substantially better product, Lindbert said.
R. David Pittle, technical director at Consumer Reports, the independent product-testing magazine, agrees. The magazine evaluates hundreds of tires at its testing ground in Connecticut and through the years has found that “overall, tires are quite good,” assuming they are properly maintained.
“In any test group of six to 10 different [competing] tires,” he said, “the top will score in the ‘excellent’ range and the bottom will be in the ‘good’ range.”
*
Times staff writer Judy Pasternak in Washington contributed to this report.
