Tire Negligence
When is the last time you looked at your tires?
When is the last time you changed your tires suffice a flat tire?
Well…
California lawyer Chris Spagnoli, from the firm of Greene, Broillet & Wheeler, has made it her legal career to keep tire companies accountable for their negligence…
Spagnoli has gone to war with car companies and tire makers many times throughout her career…
She is now seeing a new and deadly problem…. Those tires on your vehicle may have very few miles on them and look fine, but if they are more than six years old, they may be on the road to a catastrophic automotive failure.
“We are currently working on a number of cases where the tread separated from the tire and caused serious accidents,” Spagnoli told LawyersandSettlements.
The problem is that the rubber ages, it becomes brittle and vulnerable to cracking and tread separation.
The tire might have been in the trunk for six years and never even been used…
However, Spagnoli says, aging, out-of-date tires can be dangerous and here’s why:
“Tires contain antioxidants and when they stop being effective, the rubber gets brittle and it doesn’t have the same flexibility. Even if it has perfect treads, if it is six years or older, the tire is degraded.”
One of her current cases involves a family whose child was killed when the tread separated from the tire and caused a serious accident…
The vehicle involved was used and it had been traded into a Ford dealer that fixed it up and put it back on the market without checking the age of the tires…
The tires LOOKED good but they were more than six years old…
Spagnoli stresses that tread separation is extremely hazardous because it can start slowly but as the tread comes off the tire, it creates a drag…
What happens to the driver? Drivers feel the vehicle pulling toward the damaged tire and pull the steering wheel in the opposite direction…
When the tread finally separates, the drag stops and the driver tries to correct the vehicle again creating a rollover situation.
“I work a lot with lawyers who have these kinds of cases,” says Spagnoli.
“I know lawyers who have cases where the tires were 10 years old, 15 years old, 20 years old. In my view this is really an epidemic,” she says. “There are a lot of people who are not aware that the 10-year-old tire in your trunk, that spare tire, needs to be replaced.”
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Tire Negligence- Who’s liable?
Liability in these cases may belong to the tire manufacturer or it may belong to the car company.
In some cases, the tires may be warranted for 40,000 miles but fail because they are more than six years old. Warnings about when to replace tires are, to say the least, inconsistent and the information is not easily available to consumers.
“There is nothing on the tire itself, there’s nothing they hand out when you buy a tire that says replace this tire when it gets past a certain age,” says Spagnoli.
Consumers beware
“There have been efforts both nationally and at the state level to get consumer warnings out there about the danger of aging tires,” says Spagnoli. “But those efforts have met resistance. The lawsuits are in many ways an education tool because the information does filter down.”
*Thank you to Lawyers and Settlements for the original article!
Yikes! If you have been injured in an auto accident in Arizona due to tire negligence, please give our Tucson and/or Phoenix personal injury lawyers a call and we will answer your questions.
