Danger warning on cheap Chinese tires

Nearly a half million tires manufactured in China may be rolling time bombs on light trucks and some RV recreational vehicles. A lawsuit filed in June blames cheap Chinese tires for a fatal Pennsylvania traffic accident. The suit says tread separation caused a cargo van carrying four passengers to crash, killing two passengers and injuring the other two.

In June, Foreign Tire Sales appealed to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for aid in recalling an estimated 450,000 light truck tires sold under the names Westlake, Telluride, Compass and YKS after the company allegedly learned that the manufacturer, the Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber Company, had left a critical component out of the tire.

FTS said an unknown number of the tires it sold were made without a safety feature called a gum strip which helps bind the belts of a tire to each other, the company said in a filing to the NHTSA. Some of the tires had a gum strip about half the 0.6 millimeter width that FTS expected, it said.

Foreign Tire Sales said the tires could suffer tread separation, a problem that led to the nation's largest tire recall in 2000 when more than 14 million Firestone tires were recalled for a similar problem.

But the number of defective tires could be much higher because Hangzhou has refused to specifically identify by Tire Identification Number.

The Hangzhou tires join tainted pet food, lead-coated children's toys and toxic toothpaste as some of the latest Chinese imports deemed hazardous to American consumers. According to the New York Times, Chinese products now account for 60 percent of all product recalls today.

After a fatal May crash of an ambulance, FTS said it removed tires from other ambulances and found insufficient or missing gum strips on tires manufactured by Hangzhou in 2004 and 2005. In September 2006, Hangzhou finally admitted to FTS that it had reduced or omitted the gum strip from an unspecified number of tires, FTS alleges.

But Hangzhou officials told FTS that in January 2006 it began to reintroduce some amount of the gum strip back into the tires. In March 2007, FTS did further testing and analysis on Hangzhou tires and found that they experienced tread/belt separations at 25,000 miles.

"These tires could pose an immediate danger to consumers and should be removed," said Sean E. Kane, president of Safety Research & Strategies, a safety advocacy and consulting firm that has been pushing for tougher tire safety standards.

While this is not a complete list, consumers should be on the lookout for steel-belted radial light truck tires sold under the names Westlake, Telluride, Compass and YKS in the following sizes:
• LT235/75R-15
• LT225/75R-16
• LT235/85R-16
• LT245/75R-16
• LT265/75R-16 and
• LT3X10.5-15