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Essay on Ford/Firestone Rollover Deaths

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FORD/FIRESTONE TIRE TREAD ROLLOVER DEATHS Case Details: Describe in detail the illegal/unethical behavior you will be analyzing in your case analysis. You may choose any case of interest from your text or the news. In 2001, more than 175 deaths and 700 injuries in the United States were the result of Ford Explorers rolling over after the tread separated on Firestone tires with which the Explorers had been equipped. Firestone’s Wilderness AT tires were standard with Ford Explorers in 2000. Since Ford Explorer SUVs had a much higher center of gravity and were more prone to rollover than many other types of vehicles. As a result tire failure became an especially dangerous situation which led to devastating rollover accidents. At the …show more content…

Firestone was founded by in 1900.. The company was a pioneer in the mass production of tires. Firestone used this relationship to become the original equipment supplier of Ford automobiles, and was also active in the replacement market. In 1988, Bridgestone purchased Firestone, which became Bridgestone/Firestone, Inc. Bridgestone/Firestone was headquartered in Nashville, TN, employed over 45,000 and had 30 factories in the US. In 2000, it had sales revenues of $7.5 billion. In developing the Explorer, Ford's engineers were constrained from the start by previous decisions that locked the SUV onto a narrow truck frame and into a front-end suspension that was designed in the 1960s. As early as 1987, a Ford memo warned that "light-truck rollovers are 2 to 4 times the car rate" and urged Explorer developers to consider "any design action that improves vehicle stability or helps maintain the passenger safety in the vehicle." Ford maintains it did exactly this. The Explorer's platform dated back to the late 1970s, when Ford created a new line of light trucks that came to include the Ranger pickup and the now infamous Bronco II. Both vehicles used a unique "Twin I-Beam" suspension that raised their center of gravity by placing crisscrossing beams atop one another between the front tires. The company marketed I-Beam directly to consumers, since it had been used on the original and highly popular Bronco. But the Bronco II became a

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