Importer Told to Recall Chinese Tires

Source: ABC News/AP

Federal safety officials have ordered a tiny tire importer to recall as many as 450,000 tires that it bought from a Chinese manufacturer and sold to U.S. distributors.

Foreign Tire Sales Inc., of Union, said an unknown number of the light truck radials it imported since 2002 from Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber Co., of Hangzhou, China, could suffer tread separation, a problem that led to the nation's largest tire recall in 2000.

FTS said an unknown number of the tires it sold were made without a safety feature, called a gum strip, which helps bind the belts of a tire to each other, the company said in a filing to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Some of the tires had a gum strip about half the 0.6 millimeter width that FTS expected, it said.

Heather Hopkins, a spokeswoman for NHTSA, said its enforcement officials spoke to FTS on Monday to "let them know we want a full tire recall to take place."



Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/IndustryInfo/wireStory?id=3315045

Hopefully all of these scandals will make people start to look again for a "Made in USA" label. That has been hard to come by. Unfortunately, some of the products with a made in USA label were made in the Marianas Islands by imported slave labor, without following any US laws.

Chinese inspectors have seized shipments of U.S.-made orange pulp and dried apricots containing high levels of bacteria and preservatives, the government said Tuesday.

The move appeared to be the latest attempt by China to show it is not the only country with food export safety problems.

http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/06/26/china-trade.html

Until we quit buying the cheapest thing on the counter, they will continue to send over self-exploding tires, Christmas lights that work for the 30-day warranty..and NO LONGER, shit that falls apart in your hands, food that puts your pets to sleep...permanently, etc, etc, etc.

Can't buy anything made in the USA any longer. We have a "Made in Oregon" store here in our area, and we need to see if we can get a "Made in USA" store. Maybe they can find enough stuff to actually fill it. Doubtful, if they don't start the store up soon.

Made in China sucks!!

I don't see much of a future if we keep on buying from them.

Source: USA Today

Tires made in China recalled
450,000 used on vans, SUVs could cause crashes

By Sharon Silke Carty
USA TODAY

The government has ordered a small New Jersey tire importer to recall 450,000 Chinese-made light-truck tires because they might come apart and cause fatal crashes, even though the importer says the costs of a recall would bankrupt it.

The tires, in sizes typically used by full-size vans, SUVs and pickups, are blamed in a fatal accident outside Philadelphia that's generated a lawsuit against Foreign Tire Sales of Union, N.J. FTS has in turn sued Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber, one of China's biggest tiremakers, which sold it the potentially faulty tires.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it told Foreign Tire on Monday to recall the tires. It would be the second recall in a year and a half involving Hangzhou Zhongce tires. In February 2006, Cooper Tire & Rubber recalled 288,000 passenger-car tires from the Chinese maker because they contained "unauthorized material" in the sidewalls. Cooper said that could have caused air leaks and, eventually, tread separation. Cooper couldn't be reached Monday night for comment.

Xu Youming, an administrative manager at Hangzhou, denied that the tires had safety issues.


Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/money/20070626/chinatires26.art.htm

The smart thing for FTS to do is file for bankruptcy now.

They used to be made in Ohio, I thought they still were.

They put profit over safety. FUCK EM. Hope they rot.

American company leaders have become LAZY fuckers in pursuit of the quick, easy buck, and we are all paying with our lives, our livelihoods, our health and our country.

Good thing they "saved" so much money.

and all of that romantic entrepreneurial bullshit.

The market organically takes out inferior products, right?

whether it's goods, services or employees - you get what you pay for

Just because the merchandise is expensive doesn't necessarily mean that it is well-made.

usually in quality and safety

Somebody put industrial chemicals into foodstuff to make a few more bucks.
It ended up in some of the cheapest cat food, and some of the most expensive.
Many of the latter were brands that were recommended to us by our vets and
which cost more than double what the mass-market cat foods cost.

Someone might reasonably conclude that an outfit called "Menu Foods Income Fund"
might not have the health and welfare of the consumers of that food first in mind,
but we were not buying our cat food from them -- as far as we knew until the recall
was announced. We were paying top dollar at our local pet food store for what we
thought was top quality from brands that were recommended by our veterenarians.

Seems like you can't fucking win!

The gift that keeps on giving... jobs obliterated... wages lowered... poisonous foods and medicines... now self-shredding tires.

It's really great that people like the Clintons and Edwards voted for/cheered on the bill for permanent 'free' trade with China.. And we're thanking them appropriately, by making them Democratic front runners for President!

You can't blame that on Clinton, even though reality says otherwise! He was a great friend of the working class because he has a D next to his name.

Just curious.

I happen to be an honest-to-goodness Liberal, who believes that:
1. Democrats should work for the average Joe and Jane
2. Politicians should be held accountable for their votes

I understand that these are utterly foreign concepts to most Americans these days. But, I try.

These are tires for Class 8 trucks (semis), they're made in China and they're REAL cheap for truck tires...like fifty to sixty dollars cheaper than US or European tires.

When they aren't imported by the name brand manufactures. No one in China cares about safety, they don't care about their people. Only American dollars and lots of lies and "yes yes" and then when it's time to be responsible, some low level manager is blamed. Their electronics are mostly junk, why should tires be any different? It took Korea decades to learn that quality is more important than being the cheapest guy on the block. Yet the lovers of cheap Foreign goods want quality and cheap prices.

It will be interesting when the lovers of "cheap" buy Chinese cars imported here.

It's so hard to find reliable slave labor these days. Especially among the children.

I read on another website that the company made Westlake, Compass, Telluride and YKS brands.

This is a criminal act - to intentionally leave out an important safety feature. Someone should go to prison. Yea, right.

Even though they moved the factory out of my hometown Jackson, MI over 30 years ago and went to Tennessee. Even so, they can't be beat.