Tires

The Commerce Department on Wednesday set preliminary anti-dumping duties of as much as 210% on millions of off-road tires from China that it said were being sold in the United States at unfairly low prices. The tires were the sixth Chinese product to be hit with U.S. anti-dumping duties since the start of the year. The others include nails, certain steel pipe, a teeth-whitening ingredient and laminated woven sacks used to package items such as dog food and bird seed.

Investigators are trying to determine if a separated tire tread may have caused a pickup truck to veer out of control and slam into a tree Thursday morning on the shoulder of the 10 Freeway in Ontario, killing five family members, including two children. The accident on the eastbound side of the freeway near Vineyard Avenue -- along with an early-morning big-rig accident and fire on the 10 Freeway in West Covina -- snarled traffic for hours during the beginning of the morning commute.

A lawsuit filed by two Madera women whose parents and three other relatives were killed last week in a highway crash alleges that a defective tire recalled five years ago caused their pickup truck to veer off the freeway and hit a tree. The lawsuit accuses the tire's manufacturer, Continental Tire North America, of wrongful death, negligence and product liability.

In the latest controversy involving Chinese products, federal regulators are asking a New Jersey company to recall as many as 450,000 imported tires because the product was blamed for an accident that killed two people last year. Foreign Tire Sales "needs to come up with some sort of remedy -- a recall notice and proper compensation to the consumer," Heather Hopkins, a spokeswoman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said late Monday.

China's tire-making practices should be investigated by a U.S. safety agency over a New Jersey importer's complaints that 450,000 defective tires were sold in the last six years, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration must start "an immediate investigation" after the importer detailed problems with light-truck tires from China's Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber Co., Schumer said. NHTSA spokesman Eric Bolton said the agency had no immediate comment.

The Chinese maker of tires at the center of a U.S. recall controversy denied that it supplied faulty products and accused its American distributor of making the claim to gain an advantage in a commercial dispute. U.S. regulators have ordered Foreign Tire Sales Inc. of Union, N.J., to recall as many as 450,000 tires after the company said an unknown number of light-truck radials made by Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber Co. could suffer tread separation.

U.S. safety regulators asked companies including Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. and Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. for information about any imports from Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber Co. after a recall of tires made by the Chinese company. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told 14 tire makers and importers in the U.S. to submit details by July 11 on tires they may have gotten from Hangzhou Zhongce since 2001, according to the agency's website.

The Commerce Department said it would investigate charges that Chinese off-road tire producers were selling their products in the U.S. market at below fair market prices. The department said it would also investigate whether government subsidies allowed Chinese producers to sell the off-road tires at an unfair discount.

A tire importer said Thursday it would recall 255,000 Chinese-made tires it says were defective because they lacked a safety feature that prevents tread separation. The recall involves half the number of tires that the importer, Foreign Tire Sales Inc., had identified in June as possibly posing a risk. The models involved are steel-belted radial replacement tires for pickup trucks, vans and sport utility vehicles that consumers bought from early 2004 through mid-2006, Foreign Tire Sales said.

Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. offered exchanges for certain tires sold for use with minivans and small trucks but said the decision was not a recall because no defect was found. Goodyear believes that tread separation can occur in some of these tires under adverse conditions. It offered to exchange P215/70R14 tires sold under 23 private-label names, including Douglas, Kelly, Mohave and Republic, in the U.S. and Canada.