News

[GPS: Wall Street Journal (June 11, 2001) article entitled "General Motors narrows productivity gap with Ford" contains an interesting discussion about use of statistics/data mining to make a $3 billion decision about who is to blame in Ford Explorer/Firestone tire failures. Thanks to Charles Elkan for sending these extracts]

Richard Parry-Jones, Ford's group vice president for global product development and quality, said that Ford is tightening quality standards and "setting a higher chinning bar," which has prompted some recent recalls of new products to fix problems. "Our quality is not out of control," Mr. Parry-Jones said.

Mr. Parry-Jones is also an important player in Ford's Firestone strategy, which relies heavily on sophisticated analyses of data, some done by a former Russian rocket scientist. Mr. Parry-Jones outlined on Friday Ford's view that the tire failures linked to hundreds of Explorer rollover accidents and more than 200 deaths in the U.S. and elsewhere are the result of design and manufacturing problems with certain Firestone tires.

EXPLANATION FOR LATEST RECALL

Mr. Parry-Jones said Ford decided to replace 13 million more Firestone tires, on top of 6.5 million recalled by Firestone last summer, after Ford experts created charts using Firestone's own claims data that showed potential tread failures for certain Firestone Wilderness AT tires will spike sharply as the tires become three to four years old.

In addition, Mr. Parry-Jones said Wilderness AT tires from some Firestone plants have very low rates of tread failure, while tires from other plants have higher failure rates, indicating that the root cause of the failures is the tires' construction, not the Explorer.