Word: defection
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...lawyers involved in similar legal battles. Though other attorneys, notably Bruce Kaster of Ocala, Fla., and Tab Turner of Little Rock, Ark., had been suing Firestone over the same issue for much of the decade, it was Roberts who got the first indication of the scope of the potential defect. According to him, there had been more than 1,100 incident reports and 57 lawsuits by February of this year. It took a while to grab all the spoils--Firestone incurred a fine of roughly $9,000 before handing over the testimony of some of its managers on June...
...well as in Colombia and Ecuador, as far back as the fall of 1998, a year and a half before the company started replacing them on some 30,000 vehicles in the region. It blamed Firestone's misleading diagnosis of the problem for the delay in finding the defect. Firestone says it simply mislabeled some tires as having an extra, protective nylon strip (see box) but built them according to Ford's specifications. On Thursday the Venezuelan consumer-protection agency recommended bringing criminal charges against both companies for a cover-up that the agency says has led to 46 deaths...
...sacrificed for quantity. Inspections, they charged, lasted as little as 10 sec.; solvent was rubbed on outdated and dried-out rubber to make it sticky. Firestone insists that quality control at all its plants is rigorous. Union officials, worried about their members being made scapegoats for a design defect, have defended their work and forged an unusual alliance with management on this point...
Many tire experts think that long after the blame game has cooled down, Ford and Firestone will discover there was no single defect but a combination of factors that may have led to the failures. "You've got a vehicle with marginal stability and a tire that is marginal," says Dick Baumgardner, a former Firestone engineer who now examines tire accidents for legal cases. "Put them together, and you've got a disaster." Pull them apart, and in addition to the human toll, you've got all the makings of a nasty corporate pileup...
...Many tire experts think that long after the blame game has cooled down, Ford and Firestone will discover there was no single defect but a combination of factors that may have led to the failures. "You've got a vehicle with marginal stability and a tire that is marginal," says Dick Baumgardner, a former Firestone engineer who now examines tire accidents for legal cases. "Put them together, and you've got a disaster." Pull them apart, and in addition to the human toll, you've got all the makings of a nasty corporate pileup...