| Chinese tire company up in arms over US recall |
SHANGHAI, Aug. 11 -- A CHINESE company that made the tires at the center of a huge United States recall lashed out yesterday against the American importer, accusing it of misleading regulators and the public.
The importer, Foreign Tire Sales Inc, said on Thursday it will recall 255,000 tires that it says are defective because they lack a safety feature that prevents tread separation.
The Union, New Jersey-based company has been sued by the families of two men who were killed when their van crashed in Pennsylvania on August 12, 2006. The lawsuit says the van had tires made by China's Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber Co.
Hangzhou Zhongce said FTS has given three conflicting accounts of the accident to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which in June ordered a recall of as many as 450,000 tires.
"From these three different explanations of the same case, it's clear that FTS is using nonexistent facts to mislead the public and is trying to achieve commercial gain by getting people's sympathy," the company said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press.
According to the statement, FTS said in June 2007 that a tire defect caused the accident but then said a month later the van had three Hangzhou Zhongce tires and one tire from another brand. Zhongce said that left open the possibility that the other tire could have caused the crash.
On July 27, FTS noted that a police report said the accident could have caused the tire damage found afterwards, the statement said.
"FTS distorted the facts and applied for a tire recall with the NHTSA by using actions that were not objective," it said.
"According to US regulations ... the recall has to happen. Even FTS cannot prevent it."
The Americans say the tires lack a gum strip, a key safety feature that binds the belts of a tire to each other. FTS said some tires also had a gum strip that was about half the width of the 0.6-millimeter strip that the company expected.
Chinese regulators said last month they had determined the tires met American safety standards.
FTS said on Thursday that it went "the extra mile" and ran its own battery of tests, which it said conformed to its more stringent standards.
Hangzhou Zhongce, China's second-biggest tire manufacturer, said earlier it fully cooperated with the NHTSA and found no evidence the tires had any structural defects or lacked safety features.
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