Goodyear

The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company was founded at Akron, Ohio, on 29 August 1898 by Frank Seiberling and named after Charles Goodyear, the inventor of vulcanised rubber. It remains headquartered in Akron, is quoted publicly, has been the world's third-largest tyre maker by revenue since 2021, and since 2024 has been led by Mark Stewart as chairman, president and chief executive.

The British company dates from 1913, becoming a private company in 1927 and a public one in 1928. Its factory at Bushbury on the Stafford Road, Wolverhampton — the first Goodyear plant outside the United States — was begun in 1927, when the deputy mayor laid the first brick of its 200-foot chimney in October, and the first British Goodyear tyre came out of its mould on 15 December 1927; the millionth followed within two years. The 73-acre site grew to 100 acres, with aircraft tyres from 1930, the G-3 cover of 1934, a new office block in 1961 and a £1.5 million expansion in 1965; the fifty-millionth tyre was made in 1964 and the eighty-five-millionth in 1971. A second factory opened outside Glasgow in 1957, and by 1961 the British company employed 6,200 people making tyres, tubes, transmission belting and other rubber goods; Wolverhampton alone had over 5,500 workers in 1977. The company was renamed Goodyear Great Britain Ltd in 1988, Goodyear Dunlop Tyres UK Ltd in 2003 after the 1999 alliance with Sumitomo brought Dunlop under Goodyear's management in Europe, and Goodyear Tyres UK Ltd in 2012.

For Land Rovers Goodyear's name is attached above all to the G90. When the Land Rover Wolf was developed for the Ministry of Defence in the 1990s, Goodyear G90 tyres were designed for the project and had their sidewalls strengthened during testing; the dearer Michelin was classed as an approved second choice, and G90s have since been in service on military vehicles for more than twenty years.

Output at Wolverhampton declined from the 1980s through successive rounds of redundancies. From 2012 the plant, merged with the Dunlop operation, did only mixing and retreading; closure was announced in 2015 and production ceased that December, with the machinery stripped out in 2017. The chimney that had marked the works for eighty years had already been demolished in 2008. Goodyear bought Cooper Tire & Rubber, and with it Avon Tyres, in 2021 for US$2.5 billion, sold its off-road tyre business to Yokohama in July 2024 for US$905 million, and in January 2025 announced the sale of the Dunlop brand to Sumitomo Rubber Industries for US$701 million.