Word: treaded
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...number of insurance claims for the models. (This year, according to a State Farm document examined by TIME, the number of cases has been even higher, with 12 appearing in the first four months alone.) In March, though, 30 to 40 more complaints flooded in after a report on tread-separation accidents aired on Houston TV station KHOU...
...nasty mark. Frightened by the news, Americans by the hundreds of thousands have put themselves on waiting lists for tire replacements. Auto-repair shops have had to field countless calls from panicked customers clamoring to have their tires checked, worried about every tiny shred, every tear on the tread. Nothing last week allayed those fears. On Thursday NHTSA raised to 88 the total deaths attributed to the defective tires and the number of injuries to 250. Meanwhile, Firestone's voluntary recall has so far replaced only close to 2 million of the 6.5 million defective tires that it believes...
...spring of 1999, according to plaintiff attorneys, Firestone had already logged 800 customer 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...
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...
...leaked to the media two weeks ago, show that company engineers, instead of making more substantial improvements to the SUV's stability, advised inflating tires to less than the maximum level to decrease the chance of a rollover, even though underinflated tires can in turn increase the risk of tread separation. Ford vehemently rejects the notion that tire pressure played any role, pointing out that similar Goodyear tires on its Explorer SUVs had virtually none of the same problems and that Explorers as a whole have a better safety record than similar-size SUVs and passenger cars. Documents supplied...