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Last summer , field data and government data revealed highly elevated tread separation rates on Firestone ATX and certain Firestone Wilderness AT tires . We believe that this issue will grow into a more serious problem , particularly as the tires wear and age , and in short , without this action , our customer safety would have been at risk . Our lab tests and real-world data , including Firestone 's own claims data , indicated that many of the remaining Firestone Wilderness AT tires will experience elevated failure rates , particularly as they age . Last summer , while the data indicated elevated rates of tread separation on the 6.5 Million ATX and Decatur-built Wilderness AT tires ( Exhibit 1 ) , which resulted in the Firestone recall , we did not have enough information to understand why the tires were failing . Firestone and Ford had a very long history , and Firestone produced incredibly good tires over a long , long period , and during that period when - - in the early nineties when the sourcing decisions between Firestone and Goodyear were being undertaken by the company , Firestone ranked as the No. 1 quality tire supply . Last summer the elevated levels of tire failures on the recalled tires sent a very strong signal . In addition to that , what is very unusual is that when you look at the Firestone tire performance by plant , by Firestone plant , it varies dramatically . " The bottom line to all of this is that the United States has an enormous advantage in world markets - - including currency markets - - because of our transparent , stable , democratic government , as well as our long history of innovation coupled with our current technological prowess . We looked at whether the Explorer design could cause an elevated rate of tread separation claims , and we found that this was not the case : we were able to reproduce the tire failure mode in the laboratory , independent of the Explorer , confirming the field data on Firestone and Goodyear tires . He feels that if Canada , the U.S ., and Mexico have one currency union and , believe it or not , Japan joins this union , it would go a long way toward giving our currency a broader base and some insurance against the bad effects of a currency crisis . The Opera 9 Beta also features support for BitTorrent , a popular file downloading technology , in addition to a content blocker and thumbnail previews of tabbed sites . Last month Six Apart formed an alliance with Serious Magic and VideoEgg to offer its users the latest tools to create and post video blogs . With this in mind , it is clear it would be a serious mistake , in my judgment , to try to set one standard for tire performance for the tire industry . The United States has an enormous advantage in world markets - - including currency markets - - because of our transparent , stable , democratic government , as well as our long history of innovation coupled with our current technological prowess .