Word: defectives
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...moving as good fiction. There's the story of Paula, who as a girl told Wallerstein, "I'm going to find a new mommy," and as a young woman--too young, it turned out--impulsively married a man she hardly knew. There's Billy, born with a heart defect, whose parents parted coolly and amicably but failed to provide for his pressing medical needs...
...three female Japanese interpreters in brightly colored suits hovered nearby. Ono offered a sharp contrast to the carefully scripted performance of Ford boss Jac Nasser, who would later pin the blame squarely on Firestone's tires. He was visibly uncomfortable, expressing regret on one hand, denying any tire defect on the other. And his watered-down apology incited a harsh response. Senator Richard Shelby, Alabama Republican, summed up the general sentiment by asking, "What does it take to put a company on notice that perhaps they've got a defective product out there...
...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 Inspections, they charged, lasted as little as 10 sec.; solvent was rubbed on outdated and dried-out rubber to make it sticky.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...