RMA, TIA spar over tire registration

WASHINGTON—Three things were crystal-clear at the National Transportation Safety Board's Passenger Vehicle Tire Safety Symposium.

First, everyone agreed that nothing is better to assure tire safety than to keep your tires properly inflated and maintained.

Second, everyone agreed that consumers need to be educated about the importance of inflation, maintenance and registration in case of a recall.

Third, the Rubber Manufacturers Association and the Tire Industry Association are far apart on how to accomplish the goal of increasing tire registration.

At the symposium, Tracey Norberg, senior vice president and general counsel for the Rubber Manufacturers Association, called for a return to the 1970's mandate on tire retailers to register all tires they sell.

“From our perspective, it really would be the best approach to make the registration system mandated,” she said. “We have had 32 years to try the voluntary route, and it has not worked.”

Norberg quoted statistics showing that in 1976, when mandatory registration was law, registration rates were 90 percent or more from company-owned stores, 40 to 50 percent from independent dealerships.

Today, she said, registration rates are nearly 100 percent company-owned stores, but in the single-digit range from independent dealerships.

However, Kevin Rohlwing, TIA senior vice president of training, said a return to mandatory tire registration would place an unfair and potentially ruinous burden on tire dealers.

The original registration law passed by Congress made tire dealers responsible for ensuring that tires were registered. The dealers fought to make registration voluntary and succeeded with the passage of the Surface Transportation Act in 1982.

Fines for noncompliance with the mandatory registration law ranged from $1,000 to $6,000 per violation, with maximum fines as much as $16 million, according to Rohlwing.

“The threat of bankruptcy is what retailers are being forced to face,” he said. “We would be glad to do it if we had a system that worked.”

Because there is no main database for tire identification numbers, it is extremely difficult for tire dealers or anyone else to find the TIN of a recalled tire, Rohlwing said.

“We need to get that information in the hands of technicians, because they could spot this ahead of anything and maybe pull some of these tires out of the system,” he said.

RMA listed mandatory tire registration as one of four recommendations to the NTSB, along with a TIN lookup tool, ending the sale of unsafe used tires and urging states to inform motorists about tire safety.

TIA, however, vowed to fight mandatory registration, accusing the RMA of making “little to no effort” to educate consumers about registration and recalls.

The NTSB scheduled the symposium in the light of four catastrophic tire-related accidents it began investigating earlier this year.

Six panels during the two-day program covered different topics: Tire Disablement and Vehicle Dynamics; Identifying and Analyzing Disablement-Related Crashes; Tire Registration and Recall; Tire Aging and Service Life; Advances in Tire Technology; and Tire Maintenance and Consumer Awareness.

Twenty experts on various aspects of tires testified at the symposium, including officials of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Goodyear, Michelin North America Inc., Continental Tire the Americas L.L.C., AAA, Safety Research and Strategies Inc. (SRS) and Consumer Reports.

From the testimony Dec. 9-10 and follow-up comments to the NTSB docket, the board plans to release a report in the summer of 2015 making recommendations on how to prevent tire-related highway accidents.

All of the topics are of crucial interest to the NTSB, according to Earl Weener, the NTSB board member who chaired the symposium.

“But tire safety is finally dependent on consumers, and I have concerns that consumers don't have the information they need,” Weener said.

NHTSA, TIA, the RMA, Michelin, AAA and Consumer Reports all outlined their extensive and long-standing programs to educate consumers about tire inflation, tire care and tire registration. Michelin, Conti, Goodyear and Bridgestone described their ongoing technology research, including such pending items as a Goodyear peristaltic tube/pump to keep tire pressures constant and Michelin's tread groove designs that expand rather than contracting when worn, thus improving wet traction.

A number of speakers endorsed a ban on used tires, while others supported a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip inside the tire that would allow technicians to scan the tire for its TIN and other information.

“It is shocking we cannot do machine readability and track such an important product that is highly engineered and provides great benefits to consumers,” said SRS President Sean Kane. “That is a disservice to consumers, and that is what leads to crashes that are preventable.”

Rohlwing agreed with Kane about the value of RFID, but added that there has to be a universal bar code to prevent a welter of company bar codes comparable to the many different tire registration cards dealers receive from manufacturers.

“We have to pay for universal cards,” he said.