Famine
Didn't Ford totally ignore tyre failures on Explorers, then pass the buck to Firestone (who passed it right back again) to get out of the expense?
Not quite - in my opinion, this has been blown out of proportion.
To start, the Ford Explorer was produced in two places from 1995-2001, the 'affected' years: Decatur, Illinois, and Saint Louis, Missouri. Saint Louis vehicles had Goodyear tires while Decatur vehicles had what turned out to be the ill-fated Firestone tires.
Once the Firestone scandal broke (and Ford/Firestone hadn't exactly been hiding it - the scandal was public from the first Firestone tire recall in 2000), there was a lot of finger-pointing, but nobody tried to hide anything - they were assholes in public. Originally, in mid-2001, Firestone saw the problem brewing (after a 2000 tire recall, which involved 7 million tires) and stopped all business with Ford, ending a 95-year relationship with the automaker. Following that, Ford and then-boss Jacques Nasser decided to recall more than a million Explorers (along with Mercury Mountaineers, the Explorer's twin, as well as Ford Ranger and twin Mazda B-series pickups)
solely to replace the Firestone-made Wilderness tyres, embarassingly for Firestone.
Really, the fighting has made it easier for lawsuits - basically, there's two parties to settle with, and speaking of lawsuits, Ford and Firestone have filed several against each other regarding the whole matter. The odd thing is that neither seems to be wrong - Explorers and Mountaineers made in Saint Louis, Missouri, which carried Goodyear tires, had no problems, yet Firestone Wilderness tires were also installed on Ford Rangers and Mazda B-series pickups, neither of which had tread separation problems. Even General Motors used Firestone Wilderness tires on several vehicles without a problem.
The problem I find is that most people think that if it's an Explorer with a Firestone tire (ie an Explorer manufactured in Decatur, Illinois), it's going to have a problem, and that's simply not true - claims were filed on just 338 of the 1,800,000 tires (one in 5325 tires) put on vehicles at that plant, and furthermore, the Explorer has been the most popular SUV in the country for thirteen straight model years with several million vehicles now on the road. It's gone through three generations and, hey, it's only been directly responsible for 174 deaths. In reality, at this point, all Explorers are perfectly safe regarding tire seperation, and even at the high point of the scandal (1999-2001), 99.99% of Explorers were safe. Factoring in the Explorer's derivatives (since 1997, the Mercury Mountaineer; since 1991, the Explorer Sport [2-dr] and since 2001 the Explorer Sport Trac [4-dr pickup]), the percentage of 'safe' models is even higher - not one complaint of tread separation has been leveled against the Mountaineer, Explorer Sport, or Explorer Sport Trac.
