Firestone, Ford May Face Wider Recall on Tires
Larger models of Firestone truck and sport-utility tires have been subject to the same types of complaints of tread failures in the U.S. that led to this week’s massive recall of three lines of smaller tires, according to documents obtained Friday by The Times.
Ford Motor Co. and tire maker Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. expressed confidence in the larger, 16-inch tires Friday and said they have no plans to broaden the recall of 6.5 million 15-inch tires--despite calls by consumers and product safety lawyers to do so immediately. Ford, which pulled the 16-inch tires in several foreign markets last year, has used them on almost 900,000 vehicles since 1995, most of them sold in the U.S.
Bridgestone/Firestone on Wednesday recalled the 15-inch ATX, ATX II and Wilderness AT tires, citing reports linking them to nearly 300 accidents involving 46 deaths. Most of the tires were original equipment on Ford’s best-selling Explorer sport-utility vehicle and its trucks.
On Friday, Ford extended the remedies available to anxious consumers by telling its dealers that they can use other brands of tires as replacements for the recalled 15-inch Firestones.
But despite the companies’ assurances that 16-inch tires are safe, Virginia-based product safety litigation attorney Ralph Hoar called on Firestone and Ford to pull both sizes of the tires from the market and to replace them “immediately with tires made by other manufacturers.” He said his office has received numerous reports from consumers across the country about 16-inch Firestone tire failures.
Sean Kane, head of Strategic Safety, a Virginia auto defects investigation firm, said Friday that he agreed with Hoar’s concerns.
Moorpark businessman Dave Will, whose 1999 Ford Expedition shed the treads of its right-rear 16-inch Firestone on a family trip to Lake Tahoe last year, said he is “absolutely angry that they are not taking responsibility for the 16-inch tires and recalling them.” His wife and three children were in the SUV when the tire blew apart, sending the vehicle into a 70 mph swerve that Will was able to overcome.
Although he had not complained to the tire maker or to federal safety regulators when the incident occurred last year, Will said he filed complaints with both Friday afternoon.
Hoar’s call for an expanded recall followed The Times’ disclosure Friday that Ford had unilaterally replaced thousands of the 16-inch Firestone tires for customers in the Persian Gulf and Latin America last year after receiving reports of tire-tread separation.
C. Tab Turner, an Arkansas attorney affiliated with Hoar’s Safetyforum.com consumer safety group, also said Friday that he has documented a number of cases in which the Firestone tires being used as replacements for the recalled lines also have been involved in accidents linked to tread disintegration.
But Ford spokesman Mike Vaughn said that after studying U.S. accident reports involving Firestone’s 16-inch tires, Ford did not find “an unacceptable level” of incidents that would warrant a broader recall.
There is no hard and fast number that separates acceptable and unacceptable accident rates, Vaughn and Firestone spokesman Ken Fields said Friday. And both companies say there is no reason to expand the recall or to worry about the 16-inch tires in the U.S.; they said that factors including overloading, excessively fast driving speeds and extremely hot and poor road surfaces contributed to the tire failures overseas.
“We are absolutely confident that our 16-inch tires are safe when properly maintained and inflated,” Fields said.
This week’s recall covered ATX and ATXII tires built in any Firestone plant in the U.S. and Canada, but only those Wilderness ATs built at the plant in Decatur, Ill.; all have the size designation P235/75R15. The Decatur tires are marked on the sidewall with a manufacturing code beginning with the letters VD.
Most of the recalled tires were supplied as original equipment on vehicles including 1991-2000 Ford Explorer SUVs and Ranger mini-pickups; 1996-2000 Mercury Mountaineers; a small number of 1991-94 Ford F-150 pickups; and 1994-2000 Mazda B-Series mini-pickups and 1991-94 Navajo SUVs. Recalled tires that are not on Ford products were mounted on other makes and models as replacements for the original tires, Firestone said.
Bridgestone/Firestone is conducting the recall in three phases over the next year, concentrating at first on states such as California, Arizona and Texas where hot weather is believed to have contributed to the tire failures.
On Friday, Nevada’s attorney general demanded that Bridgestone/Firestone include her state in the recall’s first phase, following a similar request by South Carolina a day earlier.
Ford has told its Ford and Lincoln Mercury dealers with tire facilities to ignore Firestone’s phasing and replace customers’ tires as soon as they can. The company said it did not want customers to have to wait weeks or months for Firestone to produce replacements. About 2,900 of the auto maker’s 4,200 dealers across the country sell and install tires.
Firestone spokesman Fields said the tire maker is sticking to its phased replacement program but would work on a case-by-case basis with customers who insist that they will not wait for replacement tires or do not want to use Firestone tires as replacements.
The company also reiterated that it will reimburse customers who had previously bought replacements for the recalled tires. Customers will have to provide documentation that the tires replaced were covered in the recall, he said.
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Times staff writers Judy Pasternak and Myron Levin contributed to this story.
