Vehicle Safety News

The Arizona Republic, "Arizona Doesn't Tread Lightly"

Every summer, hundreds of drivers experience sudden and sometimes catastrophic tread separations mostly caused by a combination of poor maintenance, tire damage and excess heat. Michael Sherwood of Queen Creek, who commutes 47 miles each way to Scottsdale, said he sees loads of tire treads on the road every summer. "There's lot of them out there," he said. "Usually, it's during the hot weather. If they're running hot, they just come apart." Sherwood had a tire-failure experience a couple of years ago when the tread stripped off one of the rear tires on his heavy-duty Ford F-250 pickup truck.

In 2004, 48 people in Arizona were killed in crashes related to tire failure, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with hundreds of non-fatal crashes linked to tires. Arizona and other hot-weather states played a major role in the Firestone light-truck tire recall in 2000, in which the high number of tread-separation crashes and fatalities in these areas convinced investigators that heat was a contributing factor in the widespread tire failures.