Products Liability Attorney in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Defective Tires and Rims

More In This Category

View Transcript

There are still problems with defective tires where they separate and when they separate when somebody is traveling at high speeds, 55 miles an hour or more, the separation can cause the vehicle to lose control, sending it off into another lane, killing innocent people in an oncoming vehicle, and innocent people and the drive in that vehicle. So there still are defective tire claims.

Defective rim claims there are very few now, because the problem with the rims that were made in the 1960s and the 1970s, and there’s still some of those vehicles out there, but the problem with the rims was addressed in the 1970s when Firestone, Goodyear, and other manufacturers changed their design so that you couldn’t have two pieces in a rim come apart at a very high velocity and cause the loss of control of the vehicle. When you lose the rim you lose steering capability. But more importantly than that, or at least as important, is that a part of that rim that’s defective will explode, okay? And it shoots off like a missile, literally at the speed of a hand propelled grenade launcher, a hand held grenade launcher, that speed. That piece of the rim goes off and if it hits somebody or something it’s going to do enormous damage, like it did to my client in Wyoming, a football coach, who was helping a buddy on his ranch in the summertime and he was in a permanent vegetative state for seven years until he passed away from the massive head injuries that he suffered when he was simply adding air to the tire of a truck. So this is 30 years after the rim had been recalled by Firestone, but those rims are still out there and Firestone believes there are 30,000 defective rims that are still out there in America today. There were millions. They’re down to about 30,000, but the defective design of the rim that can cause it, for something as simple as putting air in a tire to explode, the danger is enormous and it can cause catastrophic injury.

Minneapolis personal injury lawyer Bill Sieben describes the problems that can arise for consumers with defective tires and rims.

More Videos From This Lawyer