Background: The Great Tire Recall of 2000
In 2000, major tiremaker Firestone/Bridgestone recalled over 6.5 million tires. The tires, installed as factory equipment on Ford trucks and SUVs, suffered manufacturing defects found to have contributed to crashes resulting in 271 deaths and more than 700 injuries.
As a result of the Firestone/ Bridgestone tire recall, Congress passed the Transportation Recall Enhancement, Accountability and Documentation (TREAD) Act, which President Bush signed into law.
The "Reporting Requirements" section of the TREAD Act required the Department of Transportation (DOT) to formulate and enforce a federal regulation requiring tiremakers to issue "early warning" reports anytime one of their tires is found to have contributed to any traffic accident that results in a death, injury or property damage.
Congress Didn't Say "Secret" Reports
Now you might think the "early warning" defect reports would be the type of valuable consumer protection information made easily accessed by the public. You would be wrong.
The DOT's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) subsequently approved another regulation declaring the "early warning" reports to be "trade secrets" under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), thus allowing the tire industry to conceal them from public inspection.
The Court Decides Where the Rubber Meets the Truth
Public Citizen, a D.C.-based consumer advocacy group filed suit to have the "trade secret" regulation overturned. The tire industry's lobby group, the Rubber Manufacturers Association, rather than the government, defended the regulation in court.
In court, lawyers for the Rubber Manufacturers argued that the TREAD Act required that the "early warning" reports be made public only in response to an FOIA request "or not at all." That argument lost traction, when Circuit Judge Merrick Garland wrote in the unanimous three-judge opinion (Public Citizen, Inc. v. Rubber Manufacturers) that the words "or not at all" do not appear in the Act.
"The plain language of the TREAD Act means what it says." Judge Garland wrote, in finding that public disclosure under the TREAD Act is not dependent on the FOIA.
The Rubber Manufacturers responded to the decision by stating that "much of the information filed under the 'early warning reporting' system often consists of raw and often unverified allegations. As a consequence, it is extremely likely that some consumers' claims will in fact turn out to have been mistaken."
Public Citizen has responded by filing a FOIA request with the DOT demanding the release of every tire-related "early warning" report produced since enactment of the TREAD Act in 2000.
In a press release, Public Citizen President and former head of NHTSA Joan Claybrook stated that the TREAD Act "was intended to prevent needless deaths and injuries, like those in the Ford/Firestone tire tragedy, by giving regulators and the public quick access to information that manufacturers have about crashes involving their products."
Also See: Firestone, Ford, DOT and the Law (2000)
