Safety Agency Takes Heat Over Firestone Tire Recall

The federal agency in charge of auto safety faces growing criticism and calls for reform as consumer groups and lawmakers examine why the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration did not realize more quickly that certain Firestone tires on sport utility vehicles were failing catastrophically.

A review of the NHTSA’s response to the problems with Firestone ATX, ATXII and Wilderness tires shows that the agency was hindered by outmoded testing procedures, a heavy reliance on manufacturers to voluntarily supply safety information and a method of keeping statistics that masked potential dangers to drivers.

Muddled communications inside the agency played a role, too: Some NHTSA officials were aware in 1998 that the nation’s largest auto insurer had noticed a pattern of problems, but others didn’t find out about the alert until this spring.

And some agency officials knew as early as mid-May that Ford Motor Co. had recalled the same Firestone models overseas over the last year. But the public was not alerted to the foreign recalls until a few weeks ago.

In the intervening three months, at least five deaths potentially linked to Firestone tires have occurred and been reported to the NHTSA--four involved Wilderness tires and one an unspecified Firestone model.

NHTSA officials note in their defense that the agency has a small staff and a huge workload and that tires have generally been the safest pieces of equipment on cars and trucks.

“Even in hindsight, I don’t see that there was enough evidence before May of this year to open a defects investigation,” said NHTSA spokesman Rae Tyson.

Now, the NHTSA’s legal department is researching whether Ford was required to disclose the recalls. Investigators are seeking the help of trial lawyers and the insurance company that tried to warn the NHTSA. The tire standard, more than two decades old, is suddenly being redesigned.

But “it seems that evidence of this alleged defect could have, and maybe should have, been discovered sooner,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), wrote Monday to Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater.

A congressional staffer said hearings may be held regarding the agency’s performance on Firestone and on how to give it better tools to protect the public.

Repair shop owners, trial lawyers, private investigators and the nation’s largest auto insurer for years had been hearing eerily similar complaints: Drivers of sport utility vehicles equipped with Firestone tires were experiencing blowouts and suddenly losing control at highway speeds, leading to rollovers, crashes, injuries--even deaths.

But it wasn’t until May that the NHTSA announced it was launching an investigation after having processed allegations of 46 deaths and 333 crashes involving Firestone ATX, ATXII and Wilderness tires.

And only last week did Ford and Bridgestone/Firestone announce a voluntary recall in this country of the models under investigation. Since then, the number of U.S. fatalities allegedly linked to Firestones has risen to 54, a figure that is expected to further climb because the agency has a large backlog of unprocessed reports.

“There’s been very weak, lackadaisical leadership at the agency, even under the Clinton administration,” said Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook, who headed the NHTSA under President Carter from 1977 to 1981.

Added Consumer Reports technical director R. David Pittle: “They’re obviously in a passive mode. They need to get into high gear.”

In response to such criticisms, the agency points out that it had received only 46 complaints in nine years about the Firestone SUV tires before media reports prompted a sharp jump this year.

The Firestone tires passed NHTSA safety tests when they were introduced--the ATX in 1990 and the Wilderness in 1995. Contractors in Ohio and Virginia simulated the tires’ performance at high speeds and for long hours.

Tests Designed for Different Type of Tire

Today’s tests, however, were designed for bias-ply tires, not for the steel-belted radials that have dominated the market since the late 1980s.

The agency was considering how to upgrade the tests, but “before this happened, it wasn’t a front-burner issue,” acknowledged Stephen Kratzke, the NHTSA associate administrator for safety standards.

Things began to change after the Firestone probe began. “I thought, 46 people are dead, this isn’t what our standards are about,” he said.

Kratzke assigned about a dozen engineers to determine what caused the tread failures, and how the NHTSA could better detect future warning signs. He hopes to come up with a tougher test within two or three months.

In addition to product testing, the NHTSA maintains a database of consumer complaints to the agency’s telephone hotline and Web site. Four or five engineers are assigned to review the complaints as they are received.

But the reports involving Firestone tires didn’t stand out: There were only two complaints in 1990, five more in 1994, 10 in 1998, then 14 in 1999. While the number was rising, it was still relatively small, particularly considering that Firestone had manufactured more than 40 million of the tires.

“It was nothing against the background noise, nothing when you compare . . . complaints about other equipment on cars,” said Ken Weinstein, associate administrator for safety assurance.

Weinstein was surprised to learn this week that State Farm had e-mailed an employee in the NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation about 21 potential Firestone ATX failures between 1992 and 1998. In mid-1999, a State Farm employee repeated the insurer’s concerns during a telephone call.

A Flood of Complaints After Media Reports

But even those 21 instances would not have triggered agency action, Tyson said. It wasn’t until television stations in Houston, Miami and Los Angeles aired reports about the tire failures, and the Chicago Sun-Times ran a series of stories, that complaints began to pour in by the dozens.

To Claybrook, the former NHTSA administrator, that’s not much of an excuse. “The engineers are scared of their own shadows, and they hide behind statistics,” she said. “The analysis is not qualitative.”

In 1993, for example, only four tire complaints were filed with the NHTSA, but they included at least three deaths potentially related to peeled ATX treads.

Other critics agree. “My opinion is that one death is too many,” said Murat Okcuoglu, a senior engineer at Friedman Research Corp. in Santa Barbara who has 13 years of experience in tire analysis. “And a tread coming off is unacceptable. NHTSA does have a responsibility to distinguish these kinds of complaints from just whining.”

Manufacturers are also required to provide relevant information to the NHTSA. They should, for example, send the agency copies of the repair bulletins that they distribute to dealers. “What we ask for, they give,” Weinstein said.

But it doesn’t always happen. Ford issued recall notices for Firestone-equipped Explorers in 10 Middle East countries in September 1999, in Malaysia and Thailand in February and in Venezuela in May. But it did not send copies to the NHTSA. The company maintains that it was not obligated to do so and that the driving conditions overseas were different.

Even if NHTSA lawyers reach the opposite conclusion, the agency cannot levy a fine greater than $925,000, and that’s “chump change to a car company,” Claybrook said.

During the late 1970s, Claybrook said, the NHTSA sent letters to more than 100 trial attorneys and checked in regularly with auto repair shops and rental fleets to collect information independent of manufacturers.

Tyson said the agency still maintains such contacts informally. But several large auto rental companies said they don’t hear from NHTSA, although they sometimes report individual incidents to the agency’s hotline.

Soon after initiating the ATX-Wilderness review on May 2, some agency officials learned of Ford’s overseas recalls of the same tire models. In mid-May, a Ford executive casually mentioned them in “an oral conversation,” Weinstein said. He said he wasn’t present, but he was told about the recall at the time by a colleague who was.

“That’s absolutely horrible if NHTSA knew and didn’t disclose this publicly,” said Tab Turner, an Arkansas lawyer representing several plaintiffs suing Firestone and Ford over deaths and injuries allegedly linked to the tires. One of his clients died in recent weeks.

“If I’m driving here,” Turner said, “I should know that the same Wilderness tire that I ride on and my children ride on has been recalled in Saudi Arabia, so I can make an informed decision.”

Apparently, word of the overseas recalls didn’t spread even to other NHTSA officials. Sean Kane, president of a Virginia-based research firm, Strategic Safety, telephoned the NHTSA July 31 to say he’d found out late the previous Friday that Ford had recalled Firestone tires in Venezuela.

There was a pause, Kane recalled in a recent interview, and then this reply from his contact: “It’s going to change a few things, isn’t it?”

The implications of the overseas recalls, Kane said, “were obvious to both of us.”

The next week, Ford and Firestone asked to visit NHTSA investigators; the day after the meeting, the two companies announced the recall of 6.4 million tires in the United States.

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FORD IMAGE

The massive Firestone tire recall has also tarnished the image of Ford Motor Co. C1

* Times staff writer Myron Levin Los Angeles and researcher Sunny Kaplan in Washington contributed to this story.