TIRE PROBLEMS
September 12, 2000

Should the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have caught the Firestone tire problems sooner? Following a background report, NHTSA director Sue Bailey and House Transportation Chairman Billy Tauzin debate the issues.

Sept. 6, 2000: Rough Road Aug. 29, 2000: Road Trouble Feb. 4, 2000: Ford provides employees with Internet access Browse Online NewsHour coverage of transportation.     Ford Motor Company Firestone Tires Department of Transportation Center for Auto Safety	MARGARET WARNER: Joining us now for more on this ongoing controversy: Sue Bailey, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, who she testified at today's hearing with her boss, Transportation Secretary Slater. And Congressman Billy Tauzin, Republican from Louisiana who chaired last week's House hearing on this issue. Welcome both of you.
	Expanding NHTSA's authority
	Administrator Bailey, you did come to the Hill today asking for broad new powers for your agency. If you had had this extra authority, would some of these deaths have been prevented? SUE BAILEY, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: I believe they would have. We certainly would have started the investigation sooner had we known what was happening around the world. MARGARET WARNER: You've also asked, though, for some other changes that might come as a surprise to the public. For instance, that tire standards be updated. They were last designed in 1968, before SUV's were even around? SUE BAILEY: Yes, and essentially before radial tires were used to the extent they are today. So we are updating those standards. And we were doing that prior to this recall anyway. MARGARET WARNER: Mr. Congressman, do you think that the NHTSA, NHTSA needs more power, more authority? REP. BILLY TAUZIN, (R) Louisianan: Unquestionably, they need the opportunity to receive data from both foreign recalls and replacements and also data about claims brought against defective product, from lawsuits and complaints by customers to the tire dealers and to the automobile dealers. All of that ought to be mandated. But the agency currently possesses the ability to get that information if they are warned that there's a problem somewhere. For example, if from news clippings or word from embassies, they had heard a problem was occurring in Saudi Arabia or Malaysia, they could have requested the information about the recalls and gotten it. They could have requested information about crash data if they had wanted to, and the industry would in all probability have supplied it. What we're talking about making sure they get it without asking for it. And that seems to be an appropriate response. MARGARET WARNER: Ms. Bailey, Senator McCain and other members mentioned today that I think it was State Farm Mutual, an investigator from there had alerted your agency back in '98; that there seemed to be an unusual pattern to the claims they were getting. Why wasn't that enough to provide essentially the kind of trigger that the congressman's talking about? SUE BAILEY: That involved 21 claims that were over a period of six years when 40 million tires had been produced at that point. So that's literally less than five complaints a year, while we were getting hundreds of complaints from... about other tires. So you can see that would not have triggered an investigation at that point.
	Did NHTSA do enough?
	MARGARET WARNER: Congressman, do you think that NHTSA did everything it could under its existing authority? REP. BILLY TAUZIN: Well, NHTSA does a great job in so many areas. They save untold lives on the highway and with other safety issues. And I want to commend them for it, but they dropped the ball this time. The information was handed to them on a silver platter by State Farm in July of 1998. And those 21 incident, 14 of which involved Ford Explorers with Firestone tires, added to the database they had already collected of 30 incidents by that time, some of which were misfiled and some of which were not counted properly. Had they not filed an information away into a file drawer, where our investigators had to go and find it, had the continual flow of information continued from July of '98, even as the State Farm agent was calling in and reporting as many as 45 new cases over the course of the next 18 months, I think an investigation indeed would have been started earlier. And the proof is in the pudding. When the Texas-Houston station finally using NHTSA data connected the dots in February of the year 2000, the Texas-Houston television station finally put it all together and cranked up this investigation. That should have been, could have been done earlier. That's a failing. And I don't know how you cut it otherwise. This is a good agency, normally does a great job. And in this case, somebody dropped the ball. SUE BAILEY: I would completely disagree. Given the information we had at the time, as I have explained, you have to look at all the data coming in. Why would we have not started investigations on the other hundreds of complaints that dealt with other tires? So the problem was not that 21. That would not have triggered an investigation. The problem was we didn't have information about the hundreds of claims that were going on and we didn't have information from the worldwide marketplace. Had we had all of that information, we would have started sooner. When those numbers doubled in the spring of the year, we started the investigation in May. MARGARET WARNER: Congressman? REP. BILLY TAUZIN: Well, add to those numbers the Forest (ph?) report. There's a reporting system that highway enforcement agencies file with NHTSA that lists deaths that occur on the highway due to specific causes. There was enormous death numbers coming in. I think 29 or so in the Forest report. When you add those to the information that was already being received by NHTSA, I think an investigation would have happened. Now, Ms. Bailey's just on the job for three weeks. I understand the difficulties going back and guessing what might have happened, but the fact of the matter is there was enough information circulating that had the person who received the State Farm report merely call back State Farm and said, can you tell me more about what's going on, maybe we ought to check with Firestone, maybe you ought to check with Ford -- none of that occurred. Instead the information got filed away in file 13. Now, that's unfortunate, but that's the way it happened.
	Firestone's, Ford's responsibilities
	Now look, that's not the only thing that went wrong. I mean, Firestone, in my opinion, knew they had bad tires back in 1996, and I really question whether testing occurred on those tires under the 26 pounds per square inch when testing should have occurred. And we do have standards, and the agency does need new tires. I spoke to John McCain today, and he and I and Fred Upton and other members are working on a package of reforms that I hope will complement the administration's recommendations. In the end, before we leave session this year, we'll tighten the laws and stiffen the penalties and making sure that in the future we have a database that works and we do get timely washing and maybe even testing before bad products get on the market. MARGARET WARNER: Ms. Bailey, what about the companies - because of course they are the other big focus here. Do you find it plausible that they both said they didn't really know and probably shouldn't have known until the middle of this year that they had a problem? SUE BAILEY: I believe that the information they did have, the claims and the settlements that were occurring, would have been information that would have pointed to a problem. And that communication with us would have helped certainly instigate the investigation sooner. It would have provided information that perhaps could have saved lives. MARGARET WARNER: You all have been investigating this for months now. What have you concluded so far about why -- since there were complaints and there were claims back to '98, '97 in both companies -- why that never bubbled to the top, why something wasn't done? SUE BAILEY: They were not obligated to provide us with information about claims. That's part of what we're going to be working with the Congress to obtain -- that authority. MARGARET WARNER: No, I'm not talking about why they didn't tell you, though that's another issue, but just why they didn't issue their own recall -- why they didn't say, oh, my gosh, we're going to have a potential liability here. SUE BAILEY: I think you would need to ask the company that question. MARGARET WARNER: Mr. Tauzin, I know you have investigators working on this. What have you seen in the documents that tells you what was really going on? REP. BILLY TAUZIN: We're not fully sure. We don't know whether there was knowledge that percolated to the top of these companies. For example, when I had Mr. Nasser in front of our committee last week, I showed him a document dated '96 where one of his dealers was reporting problems with these tires on 14 Explorers at the dealership, saying I can't balance these tires, they won't balance -- the treads are wobbling. You've got to send me some replacement tires. What are we going to do? There were documents like this all over the place indicating problems through the company. Perhaps Mr. Nasser is right, perhaps people aren't weren't asking right questions at the right time. The bottom line is -- Ms. Bailey's right -- we need to make sure that without asking the right questions, the right information gets collected, somebody pays attention to it, understands it, puts the docs together and begins a recall before we lose 88 people on the highway.
	Finding the causes of the problem
	MARGARET WARNER: Finally, Ms. Bailey, are you and your investigators any closer to determining what caused the underlying problem? In other words, we saw Ford and Firestone both pointing fingers at one another today, one saying it's a tire problem; one saying it was Ford's problem. Any preliminary or conclusions yet from you? SUE BAILEY: We are just now days into the engineering evaluation phase of the investigation. That's where we're going to really find out what will tell us the defects and what caused it and if indeed there is one. And then we would certainly be recommending a full recall, and, if need be, a mandatory recall. MARGARET WARNER: Congressman Tauzin? REP. BILLY TAUZIN: Absolutely. In fact, we' going to proceed immediately in collecting the last of the test data we requested from Firestone and from Ford. I hope that comes in by the end of this week. I think that going to tell us a lot about what went wrong. Once we know what wasn't tested maybe we can make sure it gets tested properly the future. MARGARET WARNER: All right, well, Congressman, Ms. Bailey, thank you both very much.