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A tire is the only part of a vehicle that touches the road, and when one comes apart at highway speed, the driver has almost no time to react. Tread separation and blowouts don’t usually end with a flat tire on the shoulder. They end with a vehicle that leaves the road and rolls.
Most tire failures look like accidents. Some are the predictable result of a design choice, a production error, or a tire that sat in a warehouse for years before sale. Telling the difference takes the failed tire and an engineer who knows what to look for.
Langdon & Emison has spent 40 years litigating vehicle defect cases nationwide, including tire failures that ended in rollovers and fatalities. If you or a loved one was seriously injured in a crash you believe involved a defective tire, call (866) 931-2115 for a free case evaluation.
Tread separation drives most tire litigation. The tread and steel belts peel away from the tire’s casing, often in one piece, and the vehicle becomes difficult to steer in the seconds that follow.
NHTSA described the mechanism plainly in its investigation of the Firestone tires fitted to Ford Explorers. Belt-leaving-belt tread separations, the agency found, “reduce the ability of a driver to control the vehicle”, particularly when the failure happens on a rear tire at high speed, and they do so whether or not the tire also loses air. That last point matters, because manufacturers routinely argue that a tire which held pressure couldn’t have caused the crash.
On taller vehicles, the consequence is frequently a rollover. NHTSA found tread separations on SUVs produced crashes at several times the rate seen on pickups, and those crashes were more likely to injure and kill. Our vehicle rollover cases often begin as tire cases, because the tire failure put the vehicle sideways and the roof structure determined whether anyone survived. Survivors are frequently left with spinal cord injuries or permanent brain injuries.
Tire problems remain the most frequently coded vehicle-related factor in fatal crashes, for passenger vehicles and large trucks alike. The National Transportation Safety Board reported 539 deaths in tire-related passenger vehicle crashes in 2013, alongside roughly 33,000 such crashes annually. A product liability lawyer on our team can see the same failure patterns repeat across manufacturers and model years.
Manufacturers’ own recall filings to NHTSA document the failures that recur. Each of the following reflects a defect a tire maker reported to the federal government.
Surprisingly, no federal standard sets a shelf life or an age limit for tires. The federal standard governs how a tire performs when it’s new, and federal recordkeeping rules require a manufacture date on the sidewall without limiting how old a tire can be when it’s sold.
Vehicle manufacturers generally advise replacing tires at six years regardless of tread wear. Tire manufacturers generally advise removing them from service ten years after manufacture. Neither is law, and neither stops a retailer from selling a tire built before the buyer’s car was.
The manufacture date is printed on every tire, in the last four digits of the DOT code. The first two digits give the week, the last two give the year, so a tire marked 0320 was built in the third week of 2020. Few drivers have ever been told to look.
A tread separation on a loaded tractor-trailer puts an 80,000-pound vehicle out of control and sends debris into traffic. Federal safety rules address this directly. A commercial vehicle may not be operated with “any tread or sidewall separation”, and that prohibition carries no severity threshold. A visible separation is a regulatory violation, not a maintenance question.
Responsibility is often shared. The tire manufacturer may have built a defective product while the carrier ran the tire past its service life or skipped the inspections that would have caught the problem. Our truck accident attorneys pursue both, and we’ve written in more detail about who is liable in a truck tire blowout.
Federal rules also leave a gap here. Tire pressure monitoring is required only on vehicles rated at 10,000 pounds or less, and it excludes any vehicle with dual wheels on an axle, so commercial trucks carry no such warning system at all.
Tire recalls work poorly, and the reason is structural. When an independent dealer sells a tire, federal rules let the dealer satisfy its obligation by handing the buyer a registration form rather than transmitting the information itself. NTSB found that fewer than 2 percent of tires purchased at independent dealers were actually registered.
The consequence follows directly. With no record of who owns the tire, a manufacturer has no way to reach that owner when a recall is issued. NTSB reported that tire recall completion rates averaged about 44 percent between 2009 and 2013, and that manufacturers physically recovered only about 20 percent of recalled tires. The rest stayed in service, which is why checking a tire’s identification number against recall records is one of the first steps in an investigation.
Langdon & Emison is a national product liability firm whose attorneys have earned $1 billion in verdicts and settlements over 40 years of vehicle defect litigation. In Castillo v. Ford, a Ford Explorer rolled over repeatedly after the left tire detreaded, leaving the driver quadriplegic. The firm obtained a $23.4 million jury verdict on the rollover and a confidential settlement with the tire manufacturer. Past results afford no guarantee of future results. Every case is different and must be judged on its own merits.
Those who bring tire cases are usually opposed by a manufacturer arguing that the driver underinflated the tire or drove on it too long. Answering that argument takes the physical tire examined by a qualified engineer, along with the manufacturer’s own testing and claims history. Langdon & Emison is built to obtain both.
The failed tire is the most important evidence in the case and the piece most likely to be discarded. Wherever it is now, it needs to be preserved before anyone disposes of it.
Langdon & Emison represents injured people and families nationwide in tire defect and wrongful death cases. Call (866) 931-2115 or contact us online to discuss what happened with a defective tire attorney.
An engineer can usually tell from the tire itself. Separation patterns, the condition of the belt edges, evidence of oxidation, and the wear across the tread distinguish a design or manufacturing failure from ordinary wear. That analysis requires the actual tire, which is why preserving it matters so much.
Keep it, along with the other tires and the vehicle if possible, and don’t let anyone dispose of it. Tell your attorney quickly so steps can be taken to preserve the evidence.
Potentially. Many tire defects are never recalled, and completion rates are low enough that a recalled tire often stays in use. A recall is useful evidence of what the manufacturer knew, not a requirement for bringing a claim.
It can matter a great deal. Tread depth measures wear, not age, and a tire can lose the internal adhesion that holds it together while still looking serviceable. Aged tires are a recognized failure category, and the date of manufacture on the sidewall is often the first thing we check.
Depending on the facts, the tire manufacturer, the vehicle manufacturer, a retailer that sold an aged or damaged tire, a shop that performed a faulty repair, or a trucking company that failed to maintain its fleet. More than one is frequently involved, and identifying all of them early affects what the claim is worth.
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