Ford Plans to Replace More SUV, Truck Tires
Ford Motor Co. is expected to announce today that it will replace more than 10 million Firestone tires that were not covered in last year’s massive tire recall.
The 15- and 16-inch Wilderness AT tires that Ford will offer to replace were sold on sport-utility vehicles such as the Explorer, Expedition, Mercury Mountaineer and now-discontinued Ford Bronco, as well as on Ford Ranger and Mazda B-series compact pickup trucks and Ford F-150 full-size pickups.
The tires included in last summer’s recall of 6.5 million 15-inch tires, sold mainly on Ford Explorers, had a propensity to lose their treads at high speeds, causing rollover crashes. At least 184 people have been killed in crashes involving Firestone tires in the U.S., most of them riding in Explorers, the country’s most popular SUV.
On Monday, following months of feuding over the cause of the accidents, Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. took the extraordinary step of saying it will no longer supply tires to Ford, ending nearly 100 years of partnership that dates to the early years of the auto industry.
Ford’s expanded replacement offer comes after months of pressure from consumer groups and hundreds of lawsuits from crash victims and disgruntled customers. It is not known how many tire failures or crashes have been linked to the tires covered by the replacement.
Ford’s offer, which the company is calling a “customer satisfaction program” rather than a recall, will be announced after Ford Chief Executive Officer Jacques Nasser meets with officials in Congress, according to a source at Ford. The source said Ford is not seeking a formal recall by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration because it believes Bridgestone/Firestone could oppose the move and delay tire replacements for months.
Bridgestone/Firestone has not confirmed Ford’s move and had no immediate comment, spokeswoman Jill Bratina said. She noted that Chief Executive John Lampe repeatedly has said that non-recalled Firestone tires are safe.
Consumer Groups Applaud Decision
Safety advocacy groups, which have been lobbying for a wider tire recall for months, applauded Ford’s replacement move, but said that it has taken too long to correct a problem that Ford has long known about, and that the auto maker should act more decisively.
“It’s about time that Ford makes things right for the millions of Explorer customers driving on dangerous, shred-prone Firestone Wilderness AT tires,” said Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen and a former NHTSA head.
Sean Kane, head of Strategic Safety called Ford’s action “a preemptive move given that NHTSA is going to have to come out with a recommendation in the near future, which we expect will be a broadened recall.”
Public Citizen and Safetyforum.com released a report last month claiming that the non-recalled tires on Explorers were of the same design and are just as prone to failure as the tires already recalled.
In announcing the end of Firestone’s business relationship with Ford, Lampe said he has lost trust in Ford in the wake of the tire recall and accused the world’s No. 2 auto maker of concealing dangers inherent in the Explorer that contributed to the accidents.
“Business relationships, like personal ones, are built upon trust and mutual respect,” Lampe wrote in a letter addressed to Nasser and delivered Monday. “We have come to the conclusion that we can no longer supply tires to Ford since the basic foundation of our relationship has been seriously eroded.”
It took nine months to unravel a business relationship that goes beyond the ties of contractual agreements and the first sets of tires Firestone sold to Henry Ford in 1906. Ford’s 44-year-old chairman, William Clay Ford Jr., is a great-grandson of Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, the founder of Firestone Tire & Rubber.
“My mother was a member of the Firestone family,” Ford said last September in one of his few appearances before journalists since the recall. “It’s been very disappointing and sad for this to happen. It hurts to see a family name tarnished so badly.”
While dramatic, the move is unlikely to present serious financial problems for either company. Although Ford has been Bridgestone/Firestone’s biggest customer, less than 5% of the tire maker’s revenue comes from Ford, and Ford buys many of its tires from Goodyear, Michelin and other suppliers.
“Basically the Ford-Firestone issue created enough bad blood that that they felt it was better not to deal with it,” said Nicholas Lobaccaro, auto industry analyst with Lehman Brothers in New York. “Ford will have to struggle a bit, and may have to pay a little more, but they’ll get the job done. If Firestone supplies its commitments Ford will be okay.”
Firestone said it will honor all contracts to date, but will not enter into any new agreements with Ford. Rival tire makers Goodyear, Michelin and Continental are likely to share any increased business opportunities among them, Lobaccaro said.
In addition to the Wilderness AT tires sold on light trucks, other types of Firestone tires are available on Ford’s Focus, Taurus, Escape and Expedition models and on Mercury Sables.
They are also sold on various General Motors, Toyota, Nissan and Honda models.
Suppliers Now in a Stronger Position
Much of Firestone’s revenue comes from selling replacement tires. The tire maker also does considerable business with Firestone racing tires, sells tires under the Bridgestone and Dayton brands and manufactures tires for non-Bridgestone/Firestone brands.
“Imagine a supplier saying ‘No’ to all of Ford’s business 25 years ago. It would never happen,” said Mike Flynn, director of the University of Michigan’s Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation. “Now, suppliers are in a much stronger position than in the past. There’s a shifting power balance, with Bridgestone having lots of customers beyond Ford. They can replace that pretty quickly.”
The recall in August took about 6.5 million Firestone tires off the road within five months after scores of accidents involving the tires losing their treads left more than a hundred dead. Ultimately, Firestone said that the tires’ design as well as materials and production processes contributed to the tire’s failure, but that blame lay also in the design of the Explorer, which critics say tends to roll over when a tire thrashes out of control.
Bridgestone/Firestone released data Monday showing that from 1993 to 1998, the years most of the claims were made against the recalled Firestone ATX, ATX II and Wilderness AT tires, the Explorer had a rollover rate of 83 per million vehicles and the Ranger 9 per million on identical ATX tires, and 23 rollovers per million vehicles for the Explorer and none for the Ranger in identical Wilderness AT tires.
“The question must be asked: Why does this seem to be happening on the Ford Explorer and not on other vehicles?” Lampe said in a separate statement.
Study Says Explorer Has More Rollovers
Also on Monday, a prominent consumer safety group put out a study saying the Explorer rolls over four times as often as other SUVs when tires fail.
An analysis of 3,500 tire failures in the government’s Firestone investigation database showed 2,450 tire failures involving Explorers resulted in 306 rollovers, or 13%, reported Arlington, Va.-based Safetyforum.com. That compared with 5% of tire failures resulting in rollovers for other Ford light trucks and 3% for other light trucks, which include SUVs, pickup trucks and minivans.
“Rollover crashes and their often fatal results need not be the result of a tire failure, if the tires are on a vehicle that is appropriately stable,” said Tab Turner, a litigation attorney who works with Safetyforum.com on tire issues. “The Ford Explorer is obviously not such a vehicle.”
Ford has insisted throughout the recall that the Explorer is safe, and that solely the tires are to blame. Explorers sold with Goodyear tires, for instance, had no incidents of losing their treads.
