Failure of tire recall system

[Ohio_Engineer]

Jan issue of Motorhome magazine had item on tire recalls and how an owner was not notified by either the RV company or the tire company. Luckily the owner saw a news story about the tire recall and had his tires replaced for free.

If there is a tire recall by law the tire company is to notify those that own covered tires BUT this requires that the tire company has been given the names and address of the owners. As posted on a tire blog:
"According to Federal law all DOT tires are supposed to be registered and that information is supposed to be entered in a big database to enable future contact in case of a recall. The problem is that according to various studies only about 17% of tires sold by dealers have the necessary registration forms completed and sent to the REGISTRATION AUTHIORITY.
Do you know if all your tires have been registered? If not then you will probably never know about a tire safety recall.."

If you want to be sure you get notified you can register your tires yourself by going to the registration authority.

[Ohio_Engineer]

Whiskey River wrote:
I did not know there was a tire registration authority. So I clicked on the Ohio Engineer's post. It has no current recall info and directs you to NHTSA's web site, which I did. There you can check any tire brand and type. Since Goodyear Marathon is everyone's favorite piece of pie, I checked them.
For Goodyear Marathon the NHTSA has 102 Complaints, 0 Recalls, 0 Investigations & 0 Manufacture Communications. I thought this was somewhat interesting as I think there are more complaints here on RV Net than at the NHTSA. I also checked Goodyear Eagle & Goodyear Wrangler and know nothing about them other than I have seen them advertised on tv. The Eagle has 362 complaints and the Wrangler has 413 complaints. So what this means, I have no clue other than I thought there would be a lot more complaints against Marathon's based on this and other forums......

Registration company only collects the info. They are not charged with monitoring automotive safety.

Many people do not know they can/should report tire failures. many also simply would rather complain around a campfire, some won't because "government is bad and can't do anything right".

NHTSA has a limited budget. They have to prioritize what to investigate Death & personal injury comes first. The complaint also requires people provide reasonable accurate info such as the correct size and full DOT serial. Also having a couple pictures of the failure might be helpful if NHTSA wants more info.
I have an email from a reader of my tire blog who filed a couple of complaints and the tire company contacted him and e ended up with a new set of tires!

[bucky]

Thanks Dutch, I didn't know that. Makes sense.

[Dutch_12078]

bucky wrote:
I fought this process for years. I had to constantly monitor my team to make sure that they were doing it. A card can be given to the customer, mailed for the customer, or entered online.
Any bets on how vigilant commissioned staff members are on this? It's a huge fine per tire, but no way can it be enforced other than spot checks.
Putting the darn thing on both sides of the tire would help, meaning the year and week also. One manufacturer did but don't remember which one. Michelin or Bridgestone maybe.

Tire date codes are only placed on one side of a tire due to the safety issues involved if a worker had to manually change the mold insert in the upper half of the curing mold working over top of the +/-350 deg.F lower mold half. Various remote code changing methods have been tried from time to time, but apparently none have worked well enough or economically enough so far for the NHTSA to require both sidewall date coding.

[Whiskey_River]

I did not know there was a tire registration authority. So I clicked on the Ohio Engineer's post. It has no current recall info and directs you to NHTSA's web site, which I did. There you can check any tire brand and type. Since Goodyear Marathon is everyone's favorite piece of pie, I checked them.
For Goodyear Marathon the NHTSA has 102 Complaints, 0 Recalls, 0 Investigations & 0 Manufacture Communications. I thought this was somewhat interesting as I think there are more complaints here on RV Net than at the NHTSA. I also checked Goodyear Eagle & Goodyear Wrangler and know nothing about them other than I have seen them advertised on tv. The Eagle has 362 complaints and the Wrangler has 413 complaints. So what this means, I have no clue other than I thought there would be a lot more complaints against Marathon's based on this and other forums......

[bucky]

I fought this process for years. I had to constantly monitor my team to make sure that they were doing it. A card can be given to the customer, mailed for the customer, or entered online.
Any bets on how vigilant commissioned staff members are on this? It's a huge fine per tire, but no way can it be enforced other than spot checks.
Putting the darn thing on both sides of the tire would help, meaning the year and week also. One manufacturer did but don't remember which one. Michelin or Bridgestone maybe.