Monday June 25, 2001
DETROIT, June 25 (Reuters) - Most Americans distrust Ford Motor Co.'s claim
that the blame for deaths and injuries in rollovers of its Explorer sport
utility vehicle lies solely with faulty Firestone tires, a poll showed Monday.
The survey, a stinging rebuke of Ford that could add weight to recent calls for an investigation of its highly popular Explorer by U.S. auto safety regulators, was published in the weekly trade magazine Automotive News.
It was conducted last week after the warring heads of Ford and Bridgestone/Firestone Inc., a unit of Japan's Bridgestone Corp. , testified before Congress about Firestone blowouts that have killed 203 people and injured more than 700 on U.S. roadways.
Most of the tires were fitted as standard equipment on Explorers, a vehicle Firestone Chief Executive John Lampe alleges to have a design defect that makes it especially prone to rollovers.
Lampe insists his company's tires are safe. But Ford CEO Jacques Nasser, who announced the recall of 13 million Firestone Wilderness ATs at a staggering cost of $3 billion last month, contends that the tires are the sole cause of most rollover accidents involving the Explorer.
In the survey in Automotive News, however, 74 percent of respondents said the Explorer rollovers were from a deadly combination of the vehicle and the tires. Only 13 percent said tires alone were responsible for the accidents, while another 13 percent said the Explorer alone was to blame.
A full 43 percent of participants in the survey gave Ford a poor ranking for its level of honesty in handling the Firestone tire recall, meanwhile, while 31 percent rated its honesty as merely ``fair.''
Only 26 percent said Ford, the world's second-largest automaker, deserved to be ranked excellent or good for honesty.
CREDIBILITY GAP GROWS
In a similar survey conducted after the recall of 6.5 million Firestone tires on Ford pickups and SUVs last August, 53 percent of consumers said the automaker deserved good or excellent marks for its honesty and only 18 percent said it warranted a poor rating.
The latest survey, based on responses from 1,412 consumers, was conducted for Automotive News by OpinionSurveys.com, a unit of Dohring Co. of Glendale, California.
The only bright side of the survey for Ford was in the fact that 62 percent of respondents said it was more credible than Bridgestone/Firestone.
Spokesmen for Ford were not immediately available for comment. But Jill Bratina of Bridgestone/Firestone said the survey showed it winning at least one point in the court of public opinion.
``We've said all along that you can't look at the tire in isolation, that you need to look at the vehicle and the tire,'' she said. ``Looking at this survey it is clear that the public understands that and believes that to be the case as well.''