Tires fail all the time.
This analysis shows that rollover crashes and their often fatal results need not be the result or a tire failure, if the tires are on a vehicle that is appropriately stable. A New York Times report last week claimed that Ford analysts have discovered that Firestone tires, other than those recalled last year, have an abnormally high failure rate. The report set off a new round of bickering between Ford and Firestone about who is most to blame. A meaningful statistical analysis of those failures is not possible without production figures, which are not publicly available. However, it is possible to determine from the database the rollover rate of various vehicles when their tires fail.