The tire industry’s central engineering premise is that a properly designed and manufactured tire should not catastrophically fail before its tread is worn to the legal minimum of 2/32 inch. When a tire on a moving vehicle delaminates—when the top steel belt and tread separate from the carcass—the result is rapid loss of vehicle control, often a rollover, often a fatality. That sequence of events has driven some of the largest auto product liability litigation in modern American history, including the Firestone tread separations on Ford Explorers in the late 1990s and the Hankook, Goodyear, and Cooper litigation that has followed.
Cronauer Law handles tire defect cases nationwide. The discipline draws on the foundational text in the field, Robert E. Ammons, Tire Defect Litigation (Lawyers & Judges 2016), and on the AIEG tire group’s accumulated archive. This page explains how a tire defect case is built, what evidence must be preserved, and how the manufacturer’s defenses are typically met.
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The single most important step in any tire defect case is preservation. Without the failed tire, the case is rarely viable; without the companions—the tires from the other three wheel positions at the time of the crash—the analysis is incomplete. The same is true of any tread pieces, belts, or fragments found at the scene.
Cronauer Law’s investigators are trained to locate, document, and preserve tires with chain of custody. We photograph the DOT code on the sidewall before anything else, measure tread depth across the crown and circumference at multiple points, document inflation pressure (where measurable), and bag and tag any debris found at the scene.
The Department of Transportation tire identification number is the most important piece of identifying information on a tire sidewall. Every DOT code begins with “DOT” followed by an alphanumeric string that identifies the manufacturer, the manufacturing plant, the tire size, and the week and year of manufacture (the last four digits of the modern code—WWYY).
The DOT code drives several decisions: which manufacturer to sue, which plant’s quality control history to subpoena, whether the tire was an OEM or replacement fitment, and—critically—the age of the tire. Tire age is itself a defect theory in many cases; tires more than six years old have aged rubber compounds with measurable degradation in adhesion and elasticity.
The most litigated tire failure is tread separation, also called detread. The mechanism: while the tire is in service, the interface between the top steel belt and the rest of the tire fails, separating the tread region from the carcass. The separation can be partial or complete. The driver loses control because the tire is no longer round and the wheel is no longer balanced.
Other tire failures include sidewall blowouts, bead failures, and ply separations. Not every tire failure is the result of a manufacturing or design defect; underinflation, overinflation, repaired punctures, road hazard damage, and run-flat operation can all cause failures. The forensic tire analyst’s job is to rule out these alternative causes before the case proceeds.
Tire manufacturing involves five fundamental steps: rubber compounding and mixing, component preparation (extrusion, calendaring, bead building), assembly, curing, and final finish. Each step has manufacturing tolerances and quality-control checks. Manufacturing defects identified in tire defect cases include foreign material inclusion at the belt interface (“contaminants”), out-of-round build, off-center belts, improper bead seating, and sub-cure conditions.
Design defects include inadequate inner liner construction, insufficient belt edge gauge, missing or inadequate nylon belt overlays, undersized belt skim stock, and the absence of belt edge wedges. A tire engineer compares the subject design to industry-standard alternative designs and to the manufacturer’s own subsequent or contemporary designs to demonstrate feasibility.
The inner liner retains air pressure and reduces internal moisture transmission. A defective inner liner causes pressure loss and moisture-induced belt corrosion, both of which accelerate separation.
Belt construction—the steel cords that hold the tread region in place—and the skim stock rubber that bonds the belts together, are central to tread separation cases. Belt-edge separations propagate from the edge of the top belt inward, and the skim stock’s resistance to that propagation is a function of compound chemistry, ply gauge, and edge geometry.
The tire manufacturer’s standard defense playbook is to attribute the failure to consumer misuse: underinflation, repaired punctures, repair-shop damage, overloading, or run-flat operation. Each can be addressed forensically. Underinflation produces shoulder wear patterns and bead damage that the inspection will document or rule out. Improper repairs produce identifiable patch and plug evidence. Overloading is documented through the load-and-tire information placard and the actual loading.
Where the manufacturer’s defense includes an old-tire / consumer-responsibility argument, the plaintiff’s response is typically that age-related risk was foreseeable and disclosed inadequately, or that the design did not include features—nylon overlay, oxidation-resistant compounds—that materially extend safe service life.
Industry data and manufacturer technical bulletins increasingly recognize that tires have a finite service life independent of tread wear. Six years is a frequent threshold; ten years is the manufacturer-recommended absolute service-life cap for many models. Tire age cases are pleaded both as design defects (failure to incorporate adequate aging-resistance features) and as failure-to-warn cases (inadequate disclosure of service-life limits).
It is much harder. Without the tire, the forensic analysis that drives the case—belt examination, edge analysis, compound testing—is impossible. Sometimes companion tires, scene photographs, and tread pieces preserve enough information to reconstruct the failure, but the rule is to preserve the tire.
The DOT code identifies the manufacturer, the plant, the tire size, and the week and year of manufacture. It is the starting point for every tire case. We photograph the DOT codes on every tire on the vehicle as part of intake.
No. The failure can occur at any wheel position. The rear right is statistically over-represented in highway tread separation cases, in part because that position carries more load on right-hand-drive U.S. travel and is exposed to more shoulder-debris hazards, but failures occur at every position.
A prior repair is not, by itself, a defense. Most tire repairs are performed inside the manufacturer-specified envelope (puncture under 1/4 inch in the crown, plug-and-patch, no sidewall damage). If the repair was within specification and the failure occurred outside the repair area, the failure is not attributable to the repair.
Some states have statutes of repose that bar product liability claims against the tire manufacturer beyond a fixed period after sale. Tire age and the date of the underlying sale are evaluated at intake to confirm the case is not barred.
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