Next, the tires, oh the tires... The Firestone Wilderness AT, Radial ATX and Radial ATX 2 tires were the ones involved in the lawsuits... Ford took it upon themselves to issue a recommended tire pressure of 26 psi, against Firestone's recommendation of 30 psi. The door placard listed 26 psi on all Explorers back then... The tires that were listed as "dangerous" were indeed coming apart, but with hardly any higher percentage than any other tire line up on the market... So long as they were properly maintained, they would last many many miles, and even as recent as 3 years ago, I had people requesting those specific tires because they never turned theirs in during the recall (at that time 8 years ago, so those were OLD tires), but they loved them so much. This happened a few times!

Alright, so, another interesting statistic is that almost, if not all, of those blowouts that resulted in accidents were in states with higher than average temperatures - Texas, Arizona, etc. We all know that heat is a tires worst enemy - it is put together with heat, heat also takes it apart...

Run a tire too low on air pressure and it gets hot. Run it too low too fast and the sidewall fails, run it too low on a hot highway for a long period of time, and the heat builds up throughout the entire carcass of the tire, and eventually the tread might separate...

So, we know why tires fail - either through defect, lack of maintenance, bad design, or a combination of the three... On top of the already low air pressure Ford recommended, another side note is that an unchecked tire may be well within the norm to lose 1 psi of air per month... Many people rarely check their air pressure unless a tire looks low - many radial tires may not look low until they are at or below 15 psi...

Now, lets look in to how many of these accidents probably went down - loaded, on a trip, lots of weight, forgot to check the air in the tires - hot highways, long miles between stops... then couple a blowout or tire failure with a vehicle that isn't inherently stable to start, and the rest of the tires are mushy because they are underinflated as well, and you have a perfect recipe for a huge accident... Remember, there are thousands of tire failures daily, whether be a flat tire or some other sort of tire failure, and vehicles aren't rolling over every day due to it, the driver simply pulls over to swap the spare...