Proven Safety Features Not Used on Many Tires
Safety features developed decades ago by the tire industry to keep treads from peeling off have not been used in most standard lines of tires, including models implicated in recent fatal accidents.
Safety advocates say that many of those deadly crashes might have been prevented had tire makers used these simple and inexpensive devices.
The safety measures cost from pennies to a little more than a dollar per tire, but due partly to cost-cutting pressures from their largest customers, the auto makers, tire companies have been reluctant to use them.
The devices are designed to prevent the steel belts in radial tires from separating, which can lead to the treads peeling off.
Most prominent among them are cap plies made of nylon or other materials, which are stretched like a tourniquet over the top of the belts to keep them in place. Other forms are narrow strips that tie down the edges of the belts.
Manufacturers know the safety wraps are effective, records show. But they add cost and weight to tires, and tire makers in most cases have done without them.
Safety wraps were absent from the three models of Firestone tires involved in the country’s worst tire disaster. As yet unverified reports to the government reveal more than 200 deaths in the United States and abroad from crashes triggered by separation failures of the tires. The wrecks have also left scores of survivors with brain damage and other crippling injuries.
Last August, Firestone recalled about 6.5 million of the 15-inch tires, most of them original equipment on Ford Explorer sport utility vehicles.
But Firestone is not alone. In recent years, certain models of tires made by Goodyear, Uniroyal, Continental General and Cooper have fallen prey to a rash of tread separation failures. Those tires didn’t have the safety wraps either, court papers and interviews show.
Tire industry officials have consistently maintained that safety wraps aren’t necessary to maintain the structural integrity of most models of tires. They point out that they do put the wraps in many high-performance tires, which must be capable of running at high speeds for sustained periods.
“In many cases, it’s absolutely not necessary,” said Donald B. Shea, president of the Rubber Manufacturers Assn., an industry trade group in Washington, D.C. “It’s like wearing a belt when you have suspenders on. . . . It doesn’t give you added protection.”
But in some instances, tire makers have been forced to revert to the devices when tragedy struck:
* After numerous reports of separation failures in Venezuela involving tires fitted on Explorers, Firestone began incorporating cap plies in Venezuelan tires.
* In 1996, Goodyear began putting cap plies in its 16-inch Load Range E light truck tires, after reports of at least 15 deaths and 120 injuries in tire-related crashes. “It’s a more robust construction, and as such, gives us a greater safety margin for abuse,” acknowledged Beale A. Robinson, the tire maker’s technology chief, in a recent deposition.
* Several years ago, Continental General installed a type of edge strip in some of its tires after quality assurance officials noted that belt separations were costing the firm millions in adjustment expenses, the prorated credits given consumers who return problem tires. A May 1993 memo put the cost of the proposed remedy at about 6 cents per tire.
Road Stresses Called Same on All Tires
When tire makers “get in trouble, they put them [safety wraps] in their tires,” said a former industry executive who would not speak for attribution. “It works. It always has and it always will, because it makes the tire better.”
Sean Kane, president of Strategic Safety, a Virginia-based research firm that advises plaintiffs in tire cases, agrees.
“Cap plies keep coming up as the solution to tread problems despite these [tire] companies’ individual claims that [the device has] nothing to do with safety,” he said.
Disputing industry claims that safety wraps are useful only on high-performance tires, safety advocates note that the mechanical stresses that tear some tires apart are of the same type for all models.
They describe the wraps as a needed form of insurance, particularly for marginal tires that weren’t robust enough when they left the factory, or have suffered a road impact that started a belt separation.
“I don’t care what tire it is,” said Max Nonnamaker, a former tire industry official and consultant in Akron, Ohio. Safety wraps “will cover up a lot of variations and deviations in your workmanship and even in your design. It’s a real good protector,” he said.
To be sure, the wraps won’t prevent every type of failure. With or without them, tires that are under-inflated will still be susceptible to sidewall failures, experts say--though these are less apt to send vehicles out of control. Nor will safety wraps eliminate all separation failures.
“There are circumstances where even a nylon cap will fail . . . but if it’s a 50% solution, it’s worth doing anyway,” said Bruce Kaster, a Florida plaintiffs’ lawyer and veteran of tire litigation. If safety wraps had been used “and we [had] half as many dead as we have now, would we not all think that that was a good thing?”
Despite dismissive public statements, tire makers have long recognized the effectiveness of safety wraps. From the 1960s through the ‘80s, they obtained numerous patents on variations of the devices to tame the separation problem.
Applications to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office resonate with testimonials by tire company engineer-inventors. For example, a 1974 patent assigned to Uniroyal compared the durability of tires with and without nylon caps, finding that tires with nylon plies withstood speeds 56% higher than the unprotected tires.
While some manufacturers appear to limit use of safety wraps to high-performance tires, others use the devices in their broader lines.
“Almost, if not all, of the Pirelli brand products that we manufacture have nylon cap plies or overlays, including not only our high-performance tires but also some of the more broad-line tires that we manufacture,” said Kevin Gilhuly, director of marketing communications for Pirelli Tire North America.
Tread separations have bedeviled the tire industry for decades, ever since tire makers began producing their revolutionary new product, the radial tire.
Radials offered big advantages over the old bias ply tires, including superior traction, cornering, puncture resistance and longevity. But early on, tire engineers recognized their dangerous propensity for breaking apart when the adhesive bond between the belts deteriorates, allowing the tread to peel away.
A radial tire’s belts are bound together by a rubber adhesive. Production flaws or road damage can compromise the adhesion, eventually leading to a small point of separation between the belts.
Exposed to heat and stress, the adhesion can weaken further, allowing the separation to grow.
If the separation becomes serious, vibration or a visible bulge may warn that the tire has a problem. In other cases, like some deadly accidents involving Firestone and Goodyear products, the tread can detach without warning as a vehicle barrels down a highway, sending it out of control.
Tire makers have long understood the risk. “Because radial tires are made of many raw materials and are a complicated assemblage of parts, it is to be expected that normal production of radial tires will contain some level of tires which will fail prematurely because of tread or belt separation,” Uniroyal Goodrich told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in a 1988 letter.
Still, tire makers question the need for safety wraps across broad lines of tires, and point to certain drawbacks.
Tires with cap plies have a harsher ride, industry officials say. This has not been an insurmountable problem in Europe, where high-performance tires with cap plies are in wider use than in the United States.
A further disadvantage is the additional weight. Auto makers, seeking to meet fuel economy standards, typically demand that tire manufacturers shave weight off their tires.
The biggest consideration, however, appears to be cost.
On the face of it, an extra 50 cents or dollar per tire might seem like a small price to pay to enhance safety. But with tire companies facing intense cost pressures and years of meager profits, nothing that adds cost is taken lightly.
In the tire business, “you would probably sell your children for 6 cents a tire,” said the former executive of a big tire maker.
“That’s a ton of money when you talk about a million tires. It’s not a pleasant metaphor, but that’s the way it is. . . . The cost pressures are tremendous.”
Overcapacity Puts Emphasis on Costs
Despite a wave of consolidations during the past 20 years (Bridgestone acquired Firestone, Continental gobbled up General, Uniroyal and B.F. Goodrich merged and were bought by Michelin, Goodyear acquired Dunlop, Pirelli bought Armstrong), analysts say the industry still suffers from overcapacity--in no small part because long-lived radials curb demand for replacement tires.
Cost issues loomed large in Goodyear’s decision to use cap plies to stem the tide of deadly accidents involving the Load Range E light truck tires.
Documents reveal that Goodyear decided to strengthen the Load Range E tires as early as 1996, but didn’t make the change to all the affected tires until 1999. (Goodyear made the changes in the line of tires that accounted for the most damage claims before proceeding to other lines that had fewer but still significant claims, according to the same documents.)
Robinson, the Goodyear technical chief, testified in a deposition that a decision to modify or strengthen the light truck tires “involved megabucks” and had to be made by “the top of the company.”
“We had to be thorough, we had to know we had a solution, that there weren’t better solutions, alternative solutions that were most cost-effective,” he said.
Cost pressures reflect tire makers’ subservience to their most important and powerful customers: vehicle manufacturers.
Auto makers “are squeezing every supplier to give them more for less money, and to get their suppliers more productive and share the savings,” said Mary Anne Sudol, an analyst with Dresdner Kleinwort Benson.
It’s a case of a “very powerful purchaser and very weak supplier,” said David Bradley, an auto analyst with J.P. Morgan Securities Inc.
The result is especially low margins for tires on new vehicles. Even so, tire companies feel compelled to ardently pursue such original equipment sales. They want to build brand recognition among future buyers of replacement tires, and to spread huge fixed costs over a large volume of sales.
Reflecting the domination of the auto makers was a Jan. 26, 1996, letter in which Ford tongue-lashed Goodyear over its costs.
According to the letter, which surfaced in litigation against Ford, Goodyear was charging 2% to 5% more than other suppliers on tires for eight types of vehicles, including the Explorer.
As a result of Goodyear’s “uncompetitive” prices, it “has been removed from consideration” as a supplier for some future models, including the 1998 Explorer, the letter said.
Goodyear supplied tires for some of the 1995-97 model year Explorers. When Ford rejected its prices, Goodyear lost the business to Firestone for the succeeding model years.
“When we came up with what we regarded as the right price . . . obviously that was not acceptable to Ford,” said Chris Aked, a Goodyear spokesman.
In August, when the Firestone recall touched off a vigorous campaign by Ford to deflect concern about the Explorer, the auto maker extolled the safety of those pricey Goodyear tires--claiming that their virtually trouble-free performance had shown that the Firestone tires, not Explorers, were to blame.
Cost concerns also influenced decisions on using safety wraps in the notorious Firestone 500 radial tires, the largest tire recall in history.
A 1974 memo concerning Firestone’s efforts to solve a growing belt separation problem cited several improvements the company was making at little or no cost.
But according to the memo, an additional change--adding belt edge strips for about 50 cents per tire--could not be made without “O.E. approval,” a reference to original equipment customers, or auto makers.
Asked if belt edge strips were included, a Firestone spokeswoman said they were used in tires made fitted on police vehicles and some high-performance sports cars.
Bowing to pressure, Firestone recalled an estimated 14.5 million of the tires in 1978.
Given the industry’s long experience with the wraps and their relatively low cost, plaintiffs’ attorneys and other critics say tire makers have some explaining to do.
Indeed, the absence of these preventive measures could be a key point of vulnerability for tire makers in lawsuits throughout the country.
In June, for example, a Los Angeles jury hit Dunlop Tire Corp. and an auto service center with a $13.2-million judgment in the case of a Los Angeles area man, Joven Mapa, whose van flipped over when a rear tire blew, leaving him a quadriplegic.
The service center failed to replace the tire after technicians saw signs of belt separation. As for Dunlop, evidence showed that the 14-inch tire that failed on the Mapa vehicle did not have a nylon cap, but that caps were used in the 15-inch size at a cost of about 50 cents apiece.
Tire makers “see this as a very dangerous issue,” said Dennis Carlson, a former Michelin engineer who testifies for plaintiffs in tire cases. “If it becomes known that this is a measure that will stop separations, then they will be on the hot seat.”
