If you are driving on tires older than six years, you could be putting yourself at risk.
It was supposed to be just another long drive home for the Ruvalcaba family from Houston.
August 22, 2013 about 10 a.m.
"Fuea Immidato!" Pablo Ruvalcaba said, "It was immediately that I felt a jerk on the steering wheel and I could not control it."
The noise is all any of them remember.
Romero Ruvalcaba was riding in the back seat right behind his father, "All I remember is I just heard the tire pop and the next thing I know I am lying on the ground." No warning.
"Three hours of driving. It popped," Pablo remembers.
Romero woke up first after being pulled out of the Ford Explorer by witnesses to the accident, "Opened my eyes and looked up at the sky. Saw my sister laying there," he remembered.
She was unconscious but alive, "You never want to be in that haze. It is really bad. You don't know what is going on you don't know what to do. It is just bad."
What was worse what he found as he walked around the mangled SUV, "I went to go see my mom and told her I loved her. That is it," Ruvalcaba remembers.
Irene Ruvalcaba, his mother was still seat belted in the passenger seat but she was no longer alive.
"If this tire does not come apart this family returns to their home in Houston and they go on living their life," said Rob Ammons.
Ammons is the attorney representing the Ruvalcaba's in lawsuits filed since their wreck and he fully blames this tire and tread separation.
"This was essentially a new tire if you look at the tread depth. No one would know. That the tire was you know 15 years old. No one," Ammons said.
"Sevea Nueva, It looked new. It was never used," said Pedro Ruvalcaba who had bought the tire days before.
"It was brand new from a tread depth standpoint," less than a 32nd of an inch of tread wear said Ammons.
"You generally can tell how they are doing but not always. There are no crystal balls," said Tony Montalbano.
He had nothing to do with selling the tire to the Ruvalcaba's, but he has been selling tires for decades, "If you have tires that are six years of age there is a problem that will exist. Sometimes it even happens before," Montalbano said.
In this case the tread complete separated from the steel belts underneath.
Accident investigators call tire failure the cause of the crash. The Ruvalcaba's is far from the only experience.
The Fast and the Furious actor Paul Walker was killed in a car crash when his Porsche Carrera crashed at a high rate of speed.
Investigators found that car was riding on 9 year old tires.
According to statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration there are more than 11,000 major accidents each year caused by tire failures with 200 deaths in those crashes.
NHTSA says that tire wear is a more significant issue in southern states like Texas because heat is a top factor in tires degrading.
Telling how old a tire is, is like trying to read code. It is called the DOT code. You find it somewhere on the outside of the tire usually near the tire size.
It is a string of numbers and letters starting with DOT. The last four numbers are most important because they indicate the week, and year the tire was made.
If the last four digits are 08 or less, meaning the tire was made in 2008 or older the tire is too old.
If there are only three numbers there, it means the tire was made before the year 2000.
Federal officials say look no further than the manufacturers themselves.
Virtually all tire manufacturers warranties do not go beyond 6 years, 11 thousand accidents a year seems like a huge number, but the tire industry maintains their product is safe, "We generate one tire for every man woman and child in the United States every year that is 300-330 340 million tires so I would think that those are pretty small percentages," Montalbano said.
Unless it is someone you love, "Just the fact that it is an old tire means that it is not a safe tire and they don't tell us that," Attorney Ammons said.
Federal Officials are expected to officially make a recommendation this week that all tires should be replaced six years after they were manufactured.
