From: John De Armond Newsgroups: alt.autos.toyota,alt.autos.toyota.trucks,alt.rv, rec.outdoors.rv-travel Subject: Re: Dateline NBC Tire Story Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2000 12:14:38 -0400 Jim Springer wrote: > The mob mentality this has shown really amazes me. > What are there 88 incidents that MAY be connected > to these tires. Think I read that there were 15 > million produced over the last five years, with > 4/car that is approximately 4 million vehicles > over a 5 year period. And it is not clear that > the tire caused the problem. I have had tires > delaminate and there was always a warning, usually > a thumping. Now if I continued to drive at a high > rate of speed in a vehicle that was designed for > utility not road racing and the tire lost its > tread I think that is the drivers problem more > than the tires. Incidentally I just put high end > Michelins on my wife's car and one of them had a > catastophic failure, blew out the sidewall and it > was properly inflated. Luckily she was in a > parking lot at the time. Mechanical things fail. > Maybe it is our responsibility to accept the > responsibility that comes with using anything > mechanical. Thank you, thank you, thank you for saying exactly what I've been thinking for awhile now. In addition to the points you make, another consideration is the driver's contribution. Having had blowouts in everything from a 14' Step Van to a sports car traveling at (extremely) high speed to an old Ford Bronco (want to talk about an unstable vehicle!), I just have a really hard time believing that any straight line travel blowout is going to cause any vehicle to just up and wreck. If there is any substance at all to this story, it is an indictment of the zero skill level of the average driver. Unfortunately this country has turned into a nation of whining pussys. While rummaging around, I recently found a stack of Popular Mechanics magazine from '58 and '59. Re-reading these magazines was a stark memory refresh as to how it used to be, both in terms of taking personal responsibility and about tires. One article reported on the then-very new radial tubeless tire from Goodyear and noted that this tire should enable one to drive from coast to coast without suffering a single blowout! Even up into the 60s, blowouts were just a part of driving. Still is, unfortunately. I think that when this event goes down in history, it will rank right up there with the Audi unintended acceleration, the chevy truck gas tanks, the Alar apple scare and the destruction of the nuclear power industry, all fictions created by a wild, reckless and out of control mass media, aided and abetted by the average citizen's complete and total technical illiteracy. > Want to put these tire failures in perspective, > just saw some Congressional hearings on childhood > immunizations. Immuniztions MAY be causing over > 1000/year children to be adversly affected, many > ending up with autistic symptoms. Immunizations > are government mandated and seem to be harming a > lot more people that tires bought voluntarily from > Firestone. Let's don't go there. I can still recall the palpable fear in the air during pre-Polio vaccine days. This anti-vaccine stuff is just so much more neo-luddism. John From: John De Armond Newsgroups: alt.autos.toyota,alt.autos.toyota.trucks,alt.rv, rec.outdoors.rv-travel Subject: Re: Dateline NBC Tire Story Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 01:42:55 -0400 Hugh wrote: > > For what it's worth. I just crunched some numbers in the Excel > spreadsheet that's been made available to us. I was curious about the > deaths. Out of the 88 deaths reported, 72 came from 55 cases of tread > separation. The table really makes good reading and people should study > it before passing judgment. You guy's can call it "mob mentality" or > whatever but, it sure looks like there is fire behind the smoke. The > more you hear and the more you read, the more you come to see something > is wrong here. It's more than just a fabrication on some idiot spin > doctor's report, it really is a problem. The 1453 incidents and the 88 > deaths are just a part of the story. World wide, it's a much bigger > story. Ford is partly at fault and Firestorm is partly at fault. It > begins to look like Firestorm might disappear into the dust. I'm not sure whether there is anything there or not. Assuming the validity of the government's numbers (very risky), let's first put the 88 deaths in perspective. They're lost in the noise of the approx 40,000 annual deaths from vehicle accidents. Something on the order of that number of people are killed annually by spurious air bomb deployment. A couple of other questions: How many of those deaths were solely caused by the tire failure? How many deaths were the result of other problems such as excessive speed and/or improper inflation and/or a no-skilled driver? We'll never know because of the simple fact that the government cooks the statistics to fit the problem du jour. A fairly recent graphic example was their cooking the numbers on air bags casualties last year. Turns out that the air bag was credited with saving the life of anyone who survived a wreck when the air bomb deployed. On the other side, a casualty was not credited to air bomb deployment unless it was the exclusive cause of the casualty. So, for example, the spurious deployment of an air bomb that caused a fatal wreck was not blamed on the air bomb. This is just one typical example. Another example is the long term practice by NTSHA of having cops code accidents as being caused by excessive speed in any instance where speed was involved even if speed was not a factor. Say, where a guy runs a stop sign and hits someone who was exceeding the speed limit. This practice let the government justify all their gestapo tactics during the 55 mph era. Check out the National Motorist Association for more details. Whatever the degree of design defects in the tire, I think that this is a horrible reason to trash a very old and established company like Firestone. When all the BS quits stinking, I believe that the root cause of these relatively few instances of tread separation will be Ford's selling an inherently unstable vehicle and then trying to cover the problem with improper inflation instructions. Ford's original Bronco, an example of which my father still owns, was so unstable as to be almost undrivable on the street and things haven't improved much since. I don't advocate ANY government involvement in this matter. Anyone stupid enough to buy a vehicle that handles like a Ford SUV does deserves what he/she gets. John |