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WASHINGTON, July 21 (Reuters) - Bridgestone Firestone North America Tire, LLC is taking new steps to recover any remaining defective tires at the center of the largest tire recall in history, the company said on Friday.

A unit of Japan's Bridgestone Corp., (5108.T: Quote, NEWS, Research) Firestone said it had voluntarily sent letters to tire dealers and said it planned to notify owners of the Explorer and Mountaineer sport utility vehicles made by Ford Motor Co. (F.N: Quote, Profile, Research) as well as the Navajo SUV made by Mazda, a unit of Ford.

The company launched recall and replacement programs in 2000 and 2001 of an estimated 6.5 million ATX, ATX II and certain Wilderness AT tires mainly installed as original equipment on the Ford vehicles.

Federal safety investigators had linked those brands to deadly rollover and other crashes caused by blowouts and tread separations.

According to crash data maintained by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the death toll has stood at 271 for several years.

But an independent research group, Safety Research and Strategies Inc. of Rehoboth, Massachusetts, said it identified two additional fatalities and three serious injuries from crashes linked to spares not captured by the recall.

The group's president, Sean Kane, said it worked with plaintiffs attorneys in related lawsuits and petitioned the safety agency last month after additional research to formally investigate the effectiveness of the Firestone recall.

"We were pretty stunned that it was easy to find tires," Kane said. Neither Firestone nor NHTSA would confirm the research group's findings about additional tire-related crashes and fatalities.

Firestone said 95 percent of the 6.5 million tires estimated on the road six years ago have been recovered, but contends that does not necessarily mean there are 200,000 tires still out there since the initial number was a projection.

"We were being very conservative," said Christine Karbowiak, a spokeswoman for Bridgestone.

She said reports of tire replacements are down to a trickle and had no estimate for unrecovered units. "A lot of the tires have gone out of service. We believe the number that are out there is fairly small," Karbowiak said.

Rae Tyson, a spokesman for NHTSA, said spot checks by the agency in the Washington, D.C., area recently turned up no tires on the road but found a few spares.

"It's in our best interest and their best interest to get all of them off the road," Tyson said.

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