Word: forde
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...seemingly endless spell of bad news is creating a wider and wider gulf between Ford and Firestone. "This is a tire issue, not a vehicle issue," Ford CEO Jacques Nasser stressed last week, distancing himself from the company's partner for nearly a century. But Firestone, while loath to alienate such a valuable customer, says the lower level of air pressure Ford recommended for the tires - 26 psi, compared with Firestone's suggested 30 psi - may have contributed to the trouble. Ford has decided to end its exclusive contract with Firestone and use an additional tire supplier, Michelin...
...Nasser, who was initially wary of getting caught up in an election-year circus, has decided to attend congressional hearings set for this week. He has promised to release all company documents showing what Ford knew and when it knew it; his counterpart at Bridgestone/Firestone, CEO Masatoshi Ono, will also be there. Both are sure to incur the wrath of politicians fed up with what they view as stonewalling. "This whole thing stinks," said Representative Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana Republican who is chairman of the House Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection. "You can't tell me someone at Firestone...
...complaints of tread separation on its ATX and Wilderness tires, though as a percentage of roughly 12 million tires on the road, the incidents didn't raise eyebrows. Congressional investigators, informed sources say, have connected 14 deaths in Saudi Arabia and surrounding Gulf states to some of the tires Ford quietly replaced there in the summer of 1999. The company says it knows of no such deaths. Firestone says it wasn't aware of a noticeable rise in claims for tires coming out of its Decatur plant until Ford did a sophisticated computer analysis in late July. However, according...
...With each company pointing the finger at the other, however, it's increasingly difficult to get straight answers. Last week Ford admitted it had heard of tread-separation incidents with locally made Firestone Wilderness tires in Venezuela, as 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...
...Strident denials are the order of the day for both Firestone and Ford. But no matter how fervently they argue that there was no recognizable pattern of problems with Firestone's tires in the U.S. before the recall, many critics believe that there were more than enough troubling incidents to have raised red flags long before so many lost their lives...