Word: though
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...additional 1.4 million Firestone tires - manufactured primarily at the Decatur, Ill., plant, where most of the recalled tires were made - may be even more susceptible to the same kind of deadly tread separation. Most of the tires were sold as replacements for some Ford, Chevy and Nissan SUVs, though many were probably scrapped a long time...
...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...
...tire pressure for the vehicle. Internal documents from 1989, 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...
...though, there were other signals that should perhaps have caught Ford's attention. As Firestone struggled to keep up with the insatiable appetite for Explorers, labor strife was brewing at its Decatur plant - dubbed the war zone by activists. A bitter 10-month walkout in 1994-95 left the assembly lines in the hands of unskilled replacement workers, who had few veterans to train under, and the labor dispute wasn't finally resolved until 1996. When the strike was settled, many of the old hands did not return to their jobs, and Firestone's Japanese parent, Bridgestone, shifted supervisors around...
...disingenuous, if not offensive. According to an internal Ford memo dated Oct. 1, 1999, reviewed by TIME, at least part of the reason some of the Wilderness tires were failing in the Gulf region was that the company had decided to use the North American?made tires even though Firestone had warned that they were "not meant" for the rugged terrain. Ford says it knows of no such document. Thanks to NHTSA's lax reporting requirements, the companies weren't legally required to inform the agency of any problems overseas...