I had two of those explorers, his and hers, 91 & 92, for a long time.
NEVER
NEVER
NEVER
did I have a tire problem with the 'stones.
– also never had a camber problem with either in 130k each.
Why ?
Proper maintainence.
You don’t LET your car get camber off that bad and sit back and do nothing about it.
’’ I can’t aford to fix it.’’ they cry…’‘You can’t afford NOT to fix it.’’ we counter.
Never did I put so stupidly little psi in my tires either !
32 all around.
Wore out one set of Wilderness A/T and bought a second set…BEFORE the recall !
ken green Proper maintenance plus an understanding of your vehicles capabilities. Unfortunately these are things rarely thought of by the average vehicle owner. To them load capacity means how much they can stuff into it. Placards and owner manuals are completely foreign to them. Hey! Those 30 bags of concrete mix don’t even fill it halfway. I can get more stuff!
I agree that the 25 or 26 PSI figure is enough to keep the vehicles rolling safely; all depending on certain things.
The point is that since very few people check their tires the odds are that a lot of rollovers were probably due to tires that had 20 PSI in them Or less.
So one has to wonder how many of those accidents were actually caused by owner neglect and not the fault of the tire itself. Once the bad press bandwagon gets rolling many people jump on board.
The Explorer had problems but the real reason for the problems with Firestone tires were the tires themselves. I had a set of these tires on my travel trailer (I always replace trailer tires with passenger car tires) and had 2 blowouts out of 4 new tires after traveling just 500 miles. When I took the travel trailer to a Firestone store…they sent me to a nearby Tractor Supply store because they were swamped. The technicians there took off the Firestone’s and drilled 3 inch holes in the sidewalls and added them to a large pile of tires. I asked them why they did that and they said it was a regulation of some sort. I later learned that I had purchased the Firestone tires just a few weeks before a recall of the tires was started. Talk about bad timing.
I seem to recall that the investigations found fault primarily on the part of Ford with a contributing part by Firestone. There is a concept in tort law wherein liability can be allocated based upon the contribution of each party to the damages. The court reached this result after the review by the legal teams of thousands of documents both internal and external to both companies, including internal “private” correspondence, and lengthy battles by the legal teams.
Personally, I think the SUVs of that era were terribly designed, the Explorer perhaps being the worst of the bunch… but not by a huge margin. They were all highly unstable and subject to flipping. Even modern SUVs are, IMHO, less than ideal. Encountering a curve in the road in an SUV is to me an experience in terror.
And I cannot count the number of SUVs I’ve seen flipped over in ditches on the side of the highway during snowstorms. Certainly it could be said that the drivers have unrealistic expectations of their vehicles, but I’m inclined to allocate fault. SUV drivers get used to driving no the edge of loss of control in dry weather due to poor design, and carry the same driving behaviors into bad weather. If the vehicles weren’t so unstable to begin with, I don’t think they collect in ditches during snow storms.
“I think SUVs of that era were terribly designed…the Explorer being perhaps the worse”
Absolutely ! A friend of mine sold cars at a ford dealership. We also refereed together. One snowy night we had to travel a ways and he had the travel pay. He picked up in an Explorer from the dealership and we went to and from the game later with no problem through snow. That next day he called me to tell me what happened. The snow lightened up after he dropped me off to just bare pavement after the plows came through. While driving less then 35 mph, a dog darted out in front of him and he made a sudden courses change. All of a sudden, the explorer was sliding down the road on it’s side in the opposite lane. A couple or cars swerved to avoid him and he bailed out when it finally stopped. He told the sales manager the next day, he did not want to drive or sell those " death traps" and not to let him talk to anyone interested in them or they would loose sales.
My daughter rolled a Chevy Blazer about 15 years ago swerving and braking to avoid a UPS truck that stopped in her lane. Yes, it was her fault for “failure to control” but when I quizzed her about it, I became convinced that the high center of gravity, anti-lock brakes, and the stiff suspension combined to produce an unstable reaction. In her words, “The thing went crazy!” [Luckily (?) for her, as she sat in the police cruiser to get written up, another vehicle rear-ended the cruiser and the cop smashed his nose on the steering wheel. She never got a ticket.]
