Westlake Tires

[n1kn0k]

nakabili ako sa NH Miller sa west ave (near edsa). less than 2k each (R13 gulong ko). that was in oct 2007.

[jecab15]

OK ba ang performance ng WestLake tires? Advice naman. Thanks!

[Gerbo]

Found this on the web.
http://www.tirereview.com/PrintConte...isplayFullText


Regulators Criticized in China Tire Probe
July 19, 2007
(Akron/Tire Review – Bloomberg News) U.S. regulators missed an early warning of defects that sparked a recall of 442,000 tires made in China, safety advocates contend.
Reports filed by the U.S. importer, Foreign Tire Sales, with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration contained information that was ignored, said Sean Kane, president of Safety Research & Strategies, a safety advocacy group. The importer reported almost 5,000 warranty claims, about 3,200 of which were safety-related, according to a July 2 filing with the agency.
The reports, which are not available to the public, are mandated by TREAD Act requirements that tiremakers and importers to inform the safety agency of warranty claims so that defects can be spotted before accidents occur.
“The TREAD Act gave NHTSA an additional tool to do surveillance to prevent another tragedy like Ford/Firestone,'' Kane said. “It isn't working.''
The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation began hearings Wednesday on the safety of Chinese products and federal agencies' responses to unsafe imports. The committee plans to consider the TREAD Act's effectiveness.
“With 32 million tires flowing into our country from China, consumers should have assurance that a fail-proof system is in place to ensure quality and safety,'' said Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark.
The safety agency began investigating Chinese tires after Foreign Tire Sales, based in Union, N.J., said last month the imported tires had to be recalled and informed the agency of two deaths in a rollover accident involving the tires.
The company began reporting to the safety agency in 2005 that it had an increase in claims about Chinese tires, company lawyer Lawrence Lavigne said. “NHTSA has had that data, and it didn't bother them,'' he said.
Early-warning reports from manufacturers and importers, and complaints from consumers, “have proven useful in both providing the impetus for several investigations and recalls and providing supporting data for many more,'' safety agency administrator Nicole Nason told the committee.
The early-warning reports filed by Foreign Tire Sales wouldn't have made “the top 10 complaints and not even the top 40,'' she said in an interview after her testimony. There was nothing in the reports to spur an investigation, she said.
Nason declined to say how many claims her agency received or what rate of warranty claims would trigger an agency investigation.
Foreign Tire Sales imported tires made by China's Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber Co. and sold them under the brand names Westlake, Compass and YKS. It said the tires have a defect that could cause them to fall apart on the road.
Hangzhou Zhongce in a July 12 statement denied producing defective tires.
In China on Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the quality supervision administration said government officials tested exported tires made by Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber Co. “They found that all the examples met American standards,'' the spokeswoman said.
Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, a Washington-based advocacy group, contends that “the combination of warranty-claim reports and the same factory should have alerted NHTSA.''
The warranty-claims rate for Firestone tires, which were eventually linked by the safety agency to at least 271 deaths, was about 300 tires per million, said Tab Turner, a North Little Rock, Ark., lawyer who represented accident victims in that case. The rate of safety-related claims with the Chinese tires of more than 6,000 per million should have led to a U.S. investigation, Turner said.
Kane of Safety Research & Strategies asserted that the required reports aren't tipping off regulators about possible problems because the safety agency focuses on deaths and injuries and lacks the staffers or money to study warranty claims.
The safety agency's database of early-warning reports includes 5 million records for the past four years, said agency spokesman Rae Tyson. About 200,000 records are added each quarter, he said.
About 20 people are “responsible for reviewing the data,'' he said. The early-warning reports are initially examined by “automated methods'' that “rank issues that require more review,'' he said.
The agency has declined to allow public access to the reports, preventing auto-safety researchers from evaluating which tires are experiencing unusual failure rates, Claybrook said.
“The agency is covering up information that should be public record,'' she said.
Agency administrator Nason said advocates such as Kane's group seem to want everything made public, while tire manufacturers want none. “NHTSA is in between them,'' she said.