Word: treads
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...ATXII and certain Wilderness AT tires were shredding at abnormally high rates. At least six months before Firestone launched the recall of 6.5 million defective tires in early August, it was aware of a steep rise in the number of warranty, damage and injury claims involving tread separations on those suspect models, according to confidential company reports released by congressional investigators. Firestone, which has argued that it didn't know of any pattern of problems until early August, said it didn't typically use such data to assess product quality...
...operating system, OS X, the day before Me hits stores. If it were a beauty contest, OS X's watery blue interface would win hands down over boring little Me. Then again, the much-delayed OS X is still vaporware, so beta users would be wise to tread lightly. Meantime, I'll still be hammering on Windows...
Back in the 1970s, when the 55-m.p.h. speed limit was established, U.S. tiremakers were introducing steel-belted radials--now standard on most American cars, including the Ford Explorers. Even in the '70s the fatal consequences of tread separation were well known. And so were a number of remedies, including the use of nylon caps that form a tourniquet around the belts and rubber to hold them together. Nylon caps are widespread in Europe and other parts of the world, but with U.S. speed limits set low, most experts believed they weren't necessary in America...
...caps? A series of tests were carried out in 1997, 1998 and 1999 by Standard Testing Laboratories, which performs numerous tests for the industry. One popped up in a California trial that ended in June with a jury's awarding $15 million to a man who demonstrated that the tread of his Dunlop tire had collapsed in part because the company did not design a nylon cap into the tire. He is now a quadriplegic; the case is on appeal. According to plaintiffs' lawyers and experts, the STL studies document on video what happens to major-brand-name radials...
Firestone engineers advocated the use of nylon caps in the '70s to head off the infamous tread-separation scandal on Firestone 500 radials. In this latest scandal, however, Firestone's replacement tires in the U.S. do not have nylon caps, except for a few Bridgestones shipped in from the parent company in Japan. Firestone argues that its tire problems are specific to one factory and not a matter of technology. Bridgestone, however, does sell the nylon cap Dueler for SUVs in the U.S. Like other nylon-fitted tires, they are higher-grade and cost $103 each, compared with just about...