Issue of Tire Replacements' Safety Adds Confusion to Investigation

June 21, 2001

By STEPHEN POWER, TIMOTHY AEPPEL and JOSEPH B. WHITE
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

This week's congressional hearing into the Firestone tire fiasco is creating its own confusion, swamping consumers with reams of data whose relevance is now being questioned.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was expected to provide a preliminary assessment Wednesday on whether Ford Motor Co. is replacing Firestone tires with models that in some cases have worse records for tread failures than the Firestones.

NHTSA's report was to clear up charges made at Tuesday's hearing by Rep. W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (R., La.) that Ford was using replacement tires that appear to have failure rates as high as 124 per million tires, well above the five per million Ford has cited as a benchmark. But the safety agency told congressional investigators Wednesday that it needed more time to draw any conclusions.

Mr. Tauzin, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Wednesday night said Ford will get his tire-failure data and should do its own tests. Ford spokesman Ken Zino said Ford will work with NHTSA and act quickly to resolve any problems. "We have very high confidence in makers of tires in our replacement program. We have lost our confidence in [Firestone] Wilderness AT's," he said.

Ford last month cited abnormally high tread-separation occurrences as part of its justification for replacing 13 million Firestone tires made by Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. The auto maker said tread failures never were meant to be looked at in isolation and Ford has other information that prompted its choice of which tires to use as replacements for the Firestones.

For their part, tire makers say tread-failure rates can be misleading, and federal regulators agree.

Safety Measures

How Ford looks at tire safety:

Source: the company

The debate not only is leaving consumers dazed but also is casting a shadow over all tire makers, which are being pulled into the controversy. Bridgestone/Firestone, a unit of Japan's Bridgestone Corp., already has filed a subpoena in U.S. District Court in Indianapolis seeking Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.'s data regarding the performance of Goodyear tires on Ford Explorers.

The greatest impact could be on NHTSA, which finds itself pulled in different directions -- by Ford, by Firestone, and by impatient congressional leaders. Those leaders are infuriated by the lack of progress in an investigation that began last year when Firestone recalled 6.5 million of its tires linked to deadly rollovers, mainly on Ford Explorers. The safety agency now must investigate not only the original recall, but also Ford's broader replacement program, and NHTSA is considering a probe of the Explorer SUV.

Comparing claims rates against different brands of tires is difficult, as each tire maker has its own system for tracking and defining claims.

None of them views a certain "parts per million" failure rate as a safety threshold, and they argue that their tires are fine even if they have failure rates well above five per million. "Parts per million also doesn't take into account what led to a claim in the first place," said Chuck Sinclair, a Goodyear spokesman.

For instance, a driver may run over a piece of lead pipe, causing internal damage to a tire that months later results in a tread separation. Goodyear would replace the tire, pay for damage, and record the incident as a damage claim, but wouldn't consider it a reflection on a tire's safety.

Goodyear is in a particularly difficult position. Ford has used Goodyear's low claims rate for tread separations on the 2.5 million tires supplied for Explorers in the mid-1990s as evidence that Firestone tires are faulty.

But this comparison is murky. Ford says Goodyear had only two tread separations -- which amounts to a claims rate of less than one per million -- while Firestone recorded 1,183 on about the same number of tires. But Goodyear acknowledges that it has at least four tread-separation claims on its books, though it agreed to pay damages in only two of the cases.

Firestone says it lumps everything in its claims figure -- whether or not it decided to pay anything. Firestone wants to study the way Goodyear classifies claims against tires in general, as well as those specifically arising from tread separations. Ford's vice president for communications, Jason Vines, said the auto maker's tire investigators weren't relying on tread-separation rates alone. Ford tested tires for at least three other, critical variables, he said: running temperature, the strength of the wedge that protects the steel belts from stress, and the strength of the adhesives used to hold the belts together.