Goodyear Tells Regulators of Tire Failures
Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. said Thursday that it has told federal safety regulators that its light-truck tires have been linked to accidents involving at least 15 deaths and 125 injuries.
The Akron, Ohio, tire manufacturer said it volunteered the information to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration after an article in The Times on Wednesday revealed how tire failures involving Goodyear’s 16-inch Load Range E tires had resulted in at least eight deaths, 20 injuries and about two dozen lawsuits against the company.
The lawsuits blame tread separation, virtually identical to the problems experienced by Bridgestone/Firestone, which has recalled 6.5 million tires. Accidents involving Firestone tires have been linked to more than 150 deaths and more than 500 injuries worldwide.
Chuck Sinclair, a Goodyear spokesman, said the tire maker wants to work closely with NHTSA. The company believes that all 30 accidents that it is aware of could be attributed to “outside factors”--such as a puncture, overloading or hitting a sharp object on the road. “We believe safety-related defects are not responsible for these accidents,” he said.
The company, however, has not provided tire-adjustment data to NHTSA investigators, Sinclair said. Such information, consisting of product-liability claims and customer complaints, would help federal regulators assess the failure rates of the light-truck tires, outfitted on vans, trailers and large sport-utility vehicles.
Sinclair said the company did not provide the tire-adjustment data to NHTSA “because, like other tire makers, we believe the potential for misinterpretation [of the data] is very high.”
Goodyear officials acknowledged in deposition testimony that spiraling liability claims caused the company to appoint a team of in-house experts in 1995 to study tread-separation problems. Goodyear made a design change to make the tires stronger, but it did not recall the older tires, millions of which are still on the road, including the popular Goodyear Wrangler AT and HT.
The Times reported earlier this week that executives of Kelly-Springfield Tire Co., a wholly owned Goodyear subsidiary, refused to have its tires made at Goodyear’s Gadsden, Ala., plant after tire-adjustment data showed that a “large percentage” of Gadsden tires suffered tread separation.
A NHTSA spokesman said Thursday that the agency was continuing to monitor problems involving Goodyear tires. The spokesman invited consumers who experienced problems with the light truck tires to call the Department of Transportation’s hotline at (800) 424-9393.
