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COPYRIGHT 2001 The Miami Herald
May 23--Ford Motor Co. announced Tuesday it will replace up to 13 million Firestone tires, most of them on its popular Explorer -- the same day Venezuelan investigators recommended a ban on the sale of the sports utility vehicle, saying design flaws in the Explorer, not the tires, may be to blame for dozens of fatal crashes.
Venezuelan officials, who began investigating Explorer accidents shortly before U.S. regulators, say they have discovered at least 50 recent accidents that involved Explorers not equipped with Firestone tires. At least half the accidents involved fatalities.
"We now believe that vehicle components may be primarily at fault," Samuel Guillermo Ruh Rios, head of Venezuela's consumer protection agency, told The Herald.
South Florida lawyers, meanwhile, said the recall indicates that Ford is finally acknowledging the extent of Firestone's tread-separating tire problem, implicated in hundreds of deadly rollover accidents -- but largely because it wants to control a costly public-relations nightmare.
"They are never going to acknowledge the design problem with the Explorer," said Coral Gables attorney Mike Eidson, who is heading a team of lawyers who have filed almost 200 federal lawsuits consolidated in Indianapolis. "They're too high and too narrow. And they're never going to recall them."
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