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...that's pretty much it for points of agreement. Ford insists that Explorers fitted with Goodyear tires have experienced far fewer tread problems than those equipped with Firestones. Firestone retorts that the same tire that shreds on an Explorer holds up just fine on a Ford Ranger. General Motors last week described the safety of the Wilderness AT tires it puts on pickups as "excellent"-although the No. 1 automaker said it was planning to switch to the Bridgestone brand for some of its vehicles this summer. (Bridgestone owns Firestone...
...conclusion stands out amid all the examples of mutually assured destruction: while neither Ford Explorers nor Firestone tires may be unusually dangerous in their own right, the combination of the two has sometimes proved lethal. And these products share a heritage, since Firestone customized the Wilderness AT tires for the Explorer to Ford's specifications...
...course, prototypes are early versions of vehicles that are built so that designers can get the bugs out. And Ford says it got the bugs out. "In developing any product you go through variations," says Ford spokesman Jon Harmon. "Then you test them until they meet standards." He adds that the Explorer has proved to be among the safest vehicles in its class. It's not a particularly safe class, compared with cars. The Explorer had a lower rate of fatal accidents from 1991 to 1999 than 9 of 11 other SUVs. Of the most popular models, the Explorer came...
...developing the Explorer, Ford's engineers were constrained from the start by previous decisions that locked the SUV onto a narrow truck frame and into a front-end suspension that was designed in the 1960s. As early as 1987, a Ford memo warned that "light-truck rollovers are 2 to 4 times the car rate" and urged Explorer developers to consider "any design action that improves vehicle stability or helps maintain the passenger safety in the vehicle." Ford maintains it did exactly this...
...Explorer's platform dates back to the late 1970s, when Ford created a new line of light trucks-code-named Yuma-that came to include the Ranger pickup and the now infamous Bronco II. Both vehicles used a unique "Twin I-Beam" suspension that raised their center of gravity by placing crisscrossing beams atop one another between the front tires...