"China Bomb" tires

I continue to see people talking about 'China Bomb" tires. As an engineer, this makes me a bit sad that so many people appear to have such a poor understanding of the difference between "causation" and "correlation".

While it is true that a majority of the tires on RV trailers that fail were made in Asia, and for many folks that meant "China".

But I would ask if 90+% of the tires applied to RV trailers were made in "China" why are you apparently surprised to learn that 90+% of the tires that fail in RV trailer use were made in "China"?

In an effort to make the difference between "causation" and "correlation" a bit easier to understand I  have sometimes offered the following example.

If you check with people in prison you will probably find that 90+% have eaten McDonald's fries. So, therefore, it could be concluded that eating those fries can be considered something like a "gateway drug" to breaking the law and ending up in prison. I think we can see that that conclusion is not sound or reasonable but clearly the numbers are similar to what we see in the RV community.

Yes tires in RV Trailer have shorter life than in other applications but  major reasons for the higher rate is clearly a combination of the documented very high percentage of RV Trailers with tires in overload/under-inflation as well the clearly identified impact on belt separations due to Interply Shear due to the suspension design of multi-axle RV trailers.

##RVT885