Regulators Investigating Tires Used in Ford Recall
Federal regulators said Tuesday that they have opened a defect investigation into a tire made by Continental General that Ford Motor Co. has been using to replace suspect Firestone tires in a costly recall program.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it referred the tire maker’s 16-inch General Ameri 550 AS tire to further investigation because of a tread-separation rate of 124 claims per million tires.
That’s well ahead of the 15-per-million rate of the Firestone Wilderness AT tires that Ford is replacing on its Explorer sport-utility vehicle and other models after the tires were linked to hundreds of fatal accidents.
The General tire lost its tread in seven recorded accidents, including two rollovers, which caused 17 injuries but no fatalities, NHTSA said in a statement. It did not say what vehicles were involved in the accidents, but the tire was sold mostly on the popular Ford F-Series pickup trucks. About 2.7 million of the tires have been produced since 1995.
“The Ameri 550 AS adjustment data must be viewed in the context of its application and the environment in which it is placed,” Continental General North America said in a statement. The Charlotte, N.C., company, a unit of German tire maker Continental, noted that “the Ford F-150 is a pickup truck used in off-road conditions and difficult environments, such as construction sites.”
“It cannot be compared with data from other tires . . . and it is misleading to consumers to make generalizations about safety records,” the company said.
Ford said that it has stopped using the tire in its Firestone replacement program, but that it would still be sold with new F-Series pickups.
“The tire in question represents a small percentage--less than one-tenth of a percent--of the replacement tires we planned to use,” said Sue Cischke, Ford vice president for environmental and safety engineering.
Ford’s testing of replacement tires “indicates that the Ameri 550 AS P235/70R16 meets our performance and durability requirements,” Cischke said.
Continental General has made substantial changes to the tire since it first went into production, and “the claims rates for tires manufactured after these modifications are extremely low, and there have not been any injury-producing crashes attributed to those tires,” the NHTSA statement said.
Ford announced in May that it would replace about 13 million Firestone Wilderness AT tires on Ford and Mazda vehicles at an after-tax cost of $2.1 billion. That was in addition to other tires made by Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. that were formally recalled a year ago because of their links to tread-separation accidents that left at least 203 people dead and more than 700 injured.
NHTSA’s review came at the request of Rep. W.J. “Billy” Tauzin (R-La.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who provided the safety agency with claims data collected by his committee on 11 tire models that are part of Ford’s replacement program.
In 1993, several reports of crashes caused by treads peeling off 15-inch General tires on Ford Bronco SUVs led to an investigation by NHTSA, which asked the company for documents relating to possible defects in the tires.
After reviewing data supplied by General, NHTSA closed the probe in July 1993, concluding there was no reason to suspect a defect.
At least 18 deaths and 58 injuries allegedly were caused by the failure of just one of the several tire models included in that NHTSA probe, according to court documents.
“The failure rate that General Tire admitted to exceeded that of any Firestone Wilderness tire,” said Taras Kick, a Los Angeles liability lawyer who has sued Continental General. “Now seven years later you have business as usual at General Tire, but now maybe NHTSA will hold them more accountable,” said Kick, who in April won a $55-million verdict against the tire maker for an accident that left a woman a quadriplegic.
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