Firestone and Ford go their separate ways in North America

One of the ugliest corporate feuds in the United States has quietly come to an end. After 97 years of business and even close relations between the two families, Bridgestone-Firestone delivered its last batch of tyres to the Ford Motor Co.’s Kansas City assembly plant on the first of April.

This final delivery marks the ending of one of the biggest and most expensive tyre recalls – accompanied by a lot of finger pointing and heated rhetoric – ever recorded in automotive history. The trigger for this disastrous story was a number of car accidents at the end of the last decade. Accidents that were supposedly caused by deficient car tyres, produced by Bridgestone-Firestone.

Two years ago the inglorious corporate dispute over who was to blame for a number of tyre blow-outs causing 271 deaths culminated in an unambiguous announcement by John Lampe, CEO of Bridgestone-Firestone, that the co-operation between the two companies had come to an end. This decision was reached after Ford had determined to replace about 13 million Firestone tyres fitted on the SUV models Ford Explorer and Ford Ranger. That covered the tyre models ATX, ATX II and Wilderness and exclusively in the size P 235/75 R 15, of which around two thirds entered the market as original equipment on the said SUVs.

The tyre maker blamed the Explorer and Ranger for the car accidents. Ford counter-attacked, saying it was strictly a tyre problem. The NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) sided with Ford without satisfactorily proving that there were defects in the tyre.

One day after the unremarkable batch of tyres had left the tyre maker’s plant in Oklahoma City for near-by Kansas City, John Behr, sales executive at Bridgestone-Firestone, wrote a low-key but historical letter to Ford’s purchasing department, which said: “This shipment represents the end of the business relationship between Ford and Bridgestone-Firestone in the U.S. and Canada.

I therefore assume that today, April 1, 2003, represents the first day in about 97 years that Ford and Bridgestone-Firestone are not doing business in these markets.” Outside North America the corporate relationship between the two will continue, representatives of both companies said, while the tyre maker even hopes to take up business again in North America. “You can never say never,” Firestone spokeswoman Christine Karbowiak said.

Ford spokesman Paul Wood declined to speculate about any future relationship: “We are no longer in business together in North America. That’s all we can really say at this point.”The long lasting commercial partnership had begun in 1906 when Henry Ford ordered 20,000 tyres from Harvey Firestone.

Later on, the two pioneers of the automobile industry developed close bonds of friendship, even leading to the marriage of their grandchildren William Clay Ford and Martha Parke Firestone in 1948.arno.borchers@reifenpresse.