Firestone tire failures: owner complaint analysis
What owners told NHTSA about Firestone tires; 3,843 written complaints across 9 lines, classified by failure mode and compared with the whole tire-complaint corpus.
Firestone lines with enough reports to analyze
A line appears here once at least 30 owners have filed a written account of a failure. "Relative" compares the most-described problem on that line with how often it appears across all tire complaints.
| Line | Written reports | Most described | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wilderness | 1,134 | Blowout or sudden deflation | 1.0× |
| Steeltex | 708 | Blowout or sudden deflation | 1.5× |
| Wilderness AT | 679 | Cracking or dry rot | 2.7× |
| ATX | 435 | Tread or belt separation | 1.7× |
| Steeltex R4S | 219 | Tread or belt separation | 3.1× |
| Firehawk | 204 | Blowout or sudden deflation | 1.1× |
| Affinity | 192 | Blowout or sudden deflation | 1.1× |
| Steeltex AT | 181 | Tread or belt separation | 2.3× |
| FR680 | 91 | Tread or belt separation | 1.9× |
Across every firestone tire
What owners described
Tread or belt separation appears in 25% of these reports; about 1.9× as often as across all tire complaints. Percentages are shares of the 7,959 reports filed against Firestone tires across every line and vehicle that include a written account; a single report can describe more than one problem, so they do not total 100%.
| Reported problem | This subject | All tire complaints | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tread or belt separation | 25% | 13% | 1.9× |
| Blowout or sudden deflation | 20% | 20% | 1.0× |
| Sidewall failure | 15% | 15% | 1.0× |
| Cracking or dry rot | 12% | 9% | 1.2× |
| Loss of control, rollover or collision | 10% | 8% | 1.2× |
| Bubble or bulge in the tire | 4% | 6% | 0.7× |
Mileage at failure
2,110 of these reports state an odometer reading. The middle report is at 22,000 miles, with 8 in 10 falling between 5,000 and 60,000 miles.
How to read this
Complaints are voluntarily submitted to the NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation and are not verified by NHTSA. They are owner-reported problems, not proven defects, and volume tracks how many of a tire were sold as much as how often it failed. What is comparable is the mix: which problems owners describe here versus across every tire complaint on file. That comparison, the mileage distribution and the mode rankings on this page are our analysis of the public record.
Sources
Last verified 2026-10-07 against the sources below.
- NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation; owner complaints dataset (unverified owner reports, US federal government work, public domain).
- NHTSA Recalls database, nhtsa.gov/recalls.
- Corpus baselines computed over 58,390 complaint narratives longer than 200 characters.