Tire-Pressure Regulation Overturned

A U.S. regulation requiring installation of devices to monitor tire pressure was overturned Wednesday by a federal appeals court that said it allows automakers to use a system that wouldn’t work half the time.

The regulation allowed automakers the choice of installing a direct monitoring system that checks the individual pressure of all four tires, or an indirect system that checks the pressure of the tires only in comparison to others. The indirect system isn’t as safe, since it might not show whether more than one of the tires is deflated, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals said.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration “concluded that indirect systems ‘would have provided a warning in only about 50% of the instances’ in which NHTSA found under-inflated tires,” the judges said in New York.

“The direct system would save consistently more lives each year,” said Laura MacCleery, an attorney for the Washington-based consumer advocate group Public Citizen. The previous rule was an “egregious miscarriage of the agency’s authority.”

The Department of Transportation couldn’t be reached for comment.

NHTSA shouldn’t have adopted the rule allowing the indirect tire pressure monitoring system, the court said. The rule had been written in the wake of investigations in 2000 into tread separations of Bridgestone Corp. tires installed on Ford Motor Co. Explorers. Automakers had supported the rule allowing the indirect system.