Edition: U.S. / Global

Bridgestone Asks Venezuelan Dealers to Return Some Tires

Published: August 29, 2000

Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. announced this evening that it had asked its dealers in Venezuela to return unsold 15- and 16-inch light truck tires made there, but the company rebuffed the Ford Motor Company's request for a recall of identical tires already in use in Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador.

In May, Ford recalled its Ford Explorer and F-series pickup trucks equipped with the tires in all three countries, and the automaker said today that it had urged Bridgestone to recall other manufacturers' sport utility vehicles that use the same tires. Ford also scheduled a news conference on Tuesday in Caracas, Venezuela, to explain why the automaker thought that tire-related crashes of Ford Explorer sport utility vehicles in Venezuela had solely been a result of defective tires and not because of any excessive tendency of Explorers to roll over.

Jon Harmon, a Ford spokesman, said that Ford had cut open Firestone tires returned during the recall in Venezuela and found that many lacked a protective layer of nylon or were unable to withstand high-speed driving.

Bridgestone said that problems with its tires were limited to a mislabeling of their sidewalls and insisted that the tires met Ford specifications. According to Ford, some of the mislabeled tires said that they had the nylon layer when they did not, while some tires were missing speed ratings entirely. None of the tires made in Venezuela were shipped to the United States, Ford and Bridgestone said.

The tire maker said that a broader recall was unnecessary and that it was a coincidence that the mislabeled 15-inch tires in Venezuela were the same size as the tires being recalled in the United States because the treads occasionally come off during high-speed driving.

Toyota, which used some of the tires on Toyota Land Cruisers sold in Venezuela, said that it had not received any reports of problems and did not think a broader recall was necessary.

Jorge Dominguez, a senior investigator at the Institute for Consumer Protection and Education in Venezuela, said that the agency was convinced that Ford was partly responsible for a problem that had caused more than 60 deaths in Venezuela. ''We have documentary evidence,'' he said. ''The responsibility is shared.''

Among the agency's piles of evidence, he said, were communications between the two companies as well as stickers that Ford put on its vehicles showing a lower recommended tire pressure than Firestone favored.

''If the tire manufacturer said the tire should be inflated to 32 pounds pressure, they put on their stickers that it should be 26 to 28 pounds,'' Mr. Dominguez said. ''We even have photos of the crashed vehicles showing these stickers in place.''

Ford and Firestone have only recently differed in public in the United States over the recommended tire pressure. Ford has long favored 26 pounds a square inch. Firestone, after 10 years of acquiescing to this number, abruptly announced at the beginning of its recall in the United States on Aug. 9 that the pressure should be 30 pounds a square inch.

Tires inflated to a fairly low pressure can overheat and come apart at high speeds. Virtually all of the deaths in the United States have occurred when sport utility vehicles, mostly Explorers, have rolled over when their tires failed.

Tire makers tend to prefer higher pressures because it reduces the risk of failure for the tires, which are covered by the tire makers' warranties. But higher-pressure tires increase the risk that sport utility vehicles will roll over during other driving situations without tire failure.

A Ford memorandum distributed by plaintiffs' lawyers in the United States showed that Ford rejected higher-pressure tires on a prototype of the Explorer because they tended to cause rollovers. Ford ended up choosing a different, lower-pressure tire and a different suspension.

Ford says that rollovers are the main cause of crash deaths for occupants of all brands of midsize sport utility vehicles. Explorer occupants have a lower death rate in rollovers and over all than do occupants of other midsize sport utility models, according to Ford safety officials.

In TV commercials that began showing tonight, Jacques Nasser, Ford's chief executive, emphasized that Ford had one of the best safety records, according to government data for the last 10 years.

George Pipas, a Ford market analyst, said today that Ford's sales in the United States in August would be roughly equal to last year's levels and only slightly below the company's early projections, a shortfall that he said might reflect response to the tire recall but also a somewhat slower economy and a highly competetive market.

Mr. Harmon said that Ford had not found protective nylon layers in 71 percent of the 15-inch tires from Venezuela that it cut open, nor in 55 percent of the 16-inch tires. Automakers commonly specify that tire makers include nylon for vehicles to be sold in South America because of the poor roads and because drivers frequently go extremely fast in the absence of enforced speed limits, Mr. Harmon said. The tires also failed before reaching 112 miles an hour on a dynanometer, a speed they were supposed to be able to withstand, particularly because the Explorer's engine has a computer that limits speed to 99 miles an hour, he added.

Ford has been criticized by plaintiffs' lawyers for not having Firestone include the nylon layers on Explorer tires for the United States market. Because of the good roads in the United States, manufacturers rarely use the layers except for very high-speed models like the Chevrolet Corvette sports car.

Bridgestone hinted in a letter today to the Venezuelan consumer agency that Ford might not have asked for nylon layers until recently. The letter said that Ford had specified in 1999 that the nylon be included and that nylon had been included since then. The tires in question have been produced since 1996, and the Bridgestone letter did not say whether the earlier tires had the nylon, nor were officials willing to elaborate.

Mr. Harmon said that Ford had always asked for the nylon. ''Firestone specified a nylon ply to meet Ford's performance specifications from the beginning of Ford's Explorer sales in Venezuela,'' he said.

The Firestone tires in Venezuela, as in the United States, bear no external signs that the entire tread may come off an inner layer of rubber. Yet Ford engineers who cut apart the tires from Venezuela found that they were 100 to 1,000 times as likely to show early signs of tread separation as even the recalled Firestone tires in the United States, said a person who had seen the results.

Four investigators for the House Commerce Committee visited Bridgestone's United States headquarters in Nashville today seeking evidence on what the company knew about its American tires and when.