Tire-valve defect has links to China

Poisonous pet food. Lead paint on children's toys. The latest potentially defective Chinese import to hit U.S. shores: tire-valve stems, the rubber shafts that allow motorists to fill their tires with air.

There are at least 36 million of the imported valve stems on tires on U.S. roads. Any of them could cause dangerous tire failures.

A lawsuit has blamed a defective tire-valve stem for a crash that killed a Florida driver. One U.S. importer issued a recall this month; another alerted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which has begun an investigation.

This month, the federal agency issued an advisory to motorists to check their tires for wear but said nothing about valve stems.

Most valves in question, which are said to crack prematurely, appear to be on tires sold between September 2006 and June 2007.

The extent of the problem won't be known until the NHTSA completes its investigation, an agency spokesman said. But some independent safety experts said motorists should be warned to inspect the tire-valve stems immediately.

"The company that imported most of the tires has issued a technical bulletin, but nobody seems to know about it," said Sean Kane, an auto-safety consultant with Safety Research & Strategies in Rehoboth, Mass., which issued its public warning Thursday. "We need to know because the public is entering the high-risk summer season, and this is a real problem that potentially affects millions of vehicles."

The investigation appears to stem from a lawsuit filed after the fatal crash in November of Robert Monk of Orlando, Fla. In March, his widow sued Dill Air Controls Products, blaming its tire-valve stem for causing the right rear tire of her husband's SUV to fail, precipitating the vehicle's rollover.

Soon after the suit was filed, the Oxford, N.C., company approached the NHTSA with a report of "a potential defect." The agency last month began investigating the valve stems the company distributes in the United States.

Some 30 million suspect valve stems were manufactured over five months in 2006 for Dill by Topseal, a subsidiary of Shanghai Baolong Automotive, based in Shanghai, according to the NHTSA's preliminary summary of its investigation.

In May, Dill issued a technical bulletin to customers about the tire valve.

Several calls and an e-mail to Dill's general manager were not returned.

Kane, the auto-safety consultant, said the valves could deteriorate and crack in as few as six months.

Checking the valves is not easy.

In a news release, he said, "The only way to tell if you have a valve stem made by this company is to dismount the tire from the wheel to examine it from the inside. Once they are out of the box and on a vehicle there is no tracking for these products so you can't notify owners."

On June 2, another auto-parts importer, Tech International of Johnstown, Ohio, issued a formal recall notice for 6 million valve stems made by a Chinese company with nearly the same name — Shanghai Baolong Industries — and the same address. Dates of manufacture of the defective product are also the same.

Calls to Tech International and an attorney representing the company were not returned.

An NHTSA spokesman said the Tech recall is a good enough reason for consumers to have tire valves checked. But until the Dill investigation is complete, there's not enough basis for a national alert.