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...Explorer rollovers are cheered by the split, because it will enable them to pit one company against the other in court. Accidents involving Firestone-equipped Explorers have accounted for most of the at least 174 deaths and more than 700 injuries that prompted Firestone to recall its 15-in. SUV tires last year. Ford faces hundreds of lawsuits that seek damages totaling more than $590 million, and the company is bracing for a report on the tire failures from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Moreover, Representative Billy Tauzin, a Louisiana Republican, plans to hold hearings this summer...
...Engineers were concerned from the get-go about the Explorer's stability during emergency handling procedures. After a test-track trial in April 1989-one year before the Explorer reached showrooms billed as a rugged and reliable family vehicle-a report noted that the SUV prototype "demonstrated a rollover response ... with a number of tire, tire-pressure [and] suspension configurations." Another report noted that the Explorer's "relatively high engine position ... prevents further significant improvement in the Stability Index [a measure of resistance to tipping] without extensive suspension, frame and sheet-metal revisions," which the company rejected...
...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...
...victims of rollovers of Firestone-equipped sport-utility vehicles, most of which involved the wildly popular Ford Explorer. According to federal data, 174 people have died and more than 700 have been injured in accidents stemming from tread separations and other problems linked to the 6.5 million 15-in. SUV tires that Firestone recalled last August...
Despite its denials, Ford faces growing scrutiny over the design of the Explorer and the role the SUV may have played in the highway disasters. Last month Public Citizen, a consumer watchdog group, accused Ford of knowingly building a rollover-prone Explorer and urged Firestone to expand the recall of its tires. "At its core," says Public Citizen president Joan Claybrook, "the Ford-Firestone tragedy was largely the responsibility of Ford Motor Co." This summer the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is slated to issue a long-awaited report on the cause of the rollovers...