US grants Cooper's request for inconsequential noncompliance

Washington – The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has granted Cooper Tire & Rubber Co.’s petition for a decision of inconsequential noncompliance involving 338 Cooper Discoverer AT3 tires.

The tires, all size 265/70R18, were manufactured between 27 Sept and 3 Oct 2015 at the Cooper plant in Findlay, Ohio, Cooper told NHTSA.

Cooper said the date codes were mistakenly set upside-down and backwards in the factory, causing them to be moulded into the outward sidewalls out of sequence. The problem was first discovered on 21 Oct 2015, by warehouse workers in Grand Prairie, Texas, the tire maker said.

Cooper said it returned all the tires it had in inventory to Findlay, where the error was corrected. The tires meet all federal performance requirements and all other federal labelling standards, and the company knows of no crashes, injuries, customer complaints or field reports because of the errors, it said.

NHTSA determined that Cooper proved its case, and issued the notice of inconsequential noncompliance in the 5 July Federal Register. With this finding, Cooper is excused from conducting a formal recall of the tires.