What's new
What's new

How to Identify Tires Made in USA?

morsetaper2

Diamond
Joined
Jul 2, 2002
Location
Gaithersburg, MD USA
I need tires for my 2WD Ford Ranger, P225/70R15. Would like to buy tires made in USA. I know ALL Cooper Tires are made in USA. And some of the various producers like Goodyear, Kelly, Uniroyal, and others make various models in a variety of countries incl USA. Often times the same tire model made in different countries.

But the DOT code will tell you the plant location if you know how to decode it. It used to be on the 'net somewhere, now I can't find it?

Anybody know where this info is?
 
Thanks for this. I remember seeing something similar years ago and lost track of it. Interesting how many different companies and plants manufacture tires worldwide.

I also remember years ago a car magazine, possibly Road and Track, published results of a tire test where they actually ran tires to destruction on a mechanical device that spun them and also applied a load via a roller. At some combination of speed and load all the tires failed, but the better ones held their casing together in one piece while the others would completely disintegrate.

I think the days when magazines had the budget and the aggressive management to do that kind of testing are long gone.
 
I think the days when magazines had the budget and the aggressive management to do that kind of testing are long gone.

Companies should support this type of testing by offering free product to be tested this way. If they have a good product its the perfect practical advertising much better then the "Its got better traction and you have to take our word for that" ads out there.

Dimitri
 
....... If they have a good product its the.............
Dimitri


biggest 2-letter word in the world right at the start of that sentence..... (bold-face added by me) makes you wonder how many manufacturers are selling smoke and mirrors instead of a product that matches the claims when that kind of impartial testing doesn't occur anymore. As proven by the Firestone-Ford fiasco a few years ago, you can't even trust the OEM recommendations (altho I personally survived long enough riding around on a set of those Firestones to get a voucher for a free set of replacements :D).
 
Most tire manufacturers, good or bad, aren't going to participate in anything like that because they have no control over the validity of the test procedures or apparatus.

For example, we did machine testing using roadwheels that were set in place with cranes when the machines were assembled. Weights measure in tons. The purpose was to make the radius of the contact surface as large as possible, with larger tires needing larger radius wheels to produce useful results. The ideal tire test machine would have a flat bed and no radius, but there are more than a few impracticalities in that design that are somewhat tough to overcome. In any case, tire test machines capable of producing useful and repeatable results aren't commodity items widely available. Something upward of a $million would be my guess for something useful for passenger car tires, and no magazine is going to spend that kind of money to produce an article in one issue of their rag.

The typical magazine tester would most likely run his test using the most widely available piece of test equipment. That would be a roller type chassis dyno, and the results it would produce, due to the comparatively small roller diameter, would be useless. It'll destroy any tire you run against it, but the results are no more predictive of real world conditions than if you stuck a stick of dynamite in each of a dozen unmounted tires and then claimed the one that survived the blast to the greatest degree was the best tire.

At the bottom line, testing tires is pretty simple. Figuring out HOW to test them effectively is the tough part. Effective analysis of the results is another tricky deal too, and there's very little about it that's intuitively obvious.

All the major manufacturers do competitor testing to see how they're measuring up against the competition. We used to regularly swap a new set of our tires to a car dealer for a set of competitor tires right off a new car on his lot as a method of making sure we were getting representative examples of what the carmakers were getting.

We took all sorts of precautions to assure equal test conditions in competitor tests, regardless of whether they were machine tests on on-highway wear test, or on-track adherence tests. Always assumed our competitors took the same sorts of precautions because massaging the results to favor your own product does nothing to enhance your investigation of the competitior's position in the quality chain.

For any tire manufacturer to supply tires for testing, along with implicit acceptance of the validity of results, to any organization lacking a solid capability of legitimate testing would be foolish. The only way to get legitimate 3rd party results would be for the magazine to purchase tires at the retail level from the various makers, and pay someone like TRC (contract vehicle component testing company) to run the tests. They might be able to buy the tires, but they couldn't afford the testing.
 
The typical magazine tester would most likely run his test using the most widely available piece of test equipment. That would be a roller type chassis dyno, and the results it would produce, due to the comparatively small roller diameter, would be useless.

It wasn't a chassis dyno. It was a tire testing machine. I'm sure they didn't have to buy or build the machine for a million dollars to test a dozen or so tires, they probably rented time on it.

Haven't read Road and Track for many years but it used to be a serious magazine with a capable staff and I think the testing was valid. It was a long time ago (1970's) and I tried finding a copy of the test online to no avail.
 
Of course if the maker gives free samples they will hand build each one and xray it for defects etc so they will be better then the mass produced ones you can buy. My brother told me that tire designs change so fast, even if the model names stays the same, that by the time the test is written up and printed many of the tested tires are no longer being made. Kind of like computers, by the time it hits the shelf it is obsolete.
Bill D.
 
Had the magazines vouchers for your tires to be redeemed at any location that sells them if you are worried about getting the best possible tire due to pre-screening. Even saves you money on shipping them the tires verses a slip of paper.

I don't know about any of you but a few vouchers and lending the machine to a magazine for a test is not that big of a deal in my mind if one indeed believes there tires to be the best due to their own in house competitor testing.

Dimitri
 
Tire testing

I live not far from the Firestone test track at Ft. Stockton, TX and you used to see cars and trucks on it all the time. Now you rarely see anything on the track. I don't think the mfg's are doing much testing (real testing) anymore.

John C
 
Take all of this with a huge bag, not a grain, of salt. For instance the plant in Albany GA, soon to close, run by Cooper is shown as Cooper, Bridgestone-Firestone, Seiberling, and Dayton. I may have missed some. I have tires on my Ford Ranger, Big O brand that show Seiberling at Lavergne TN. Of course it is also listed as Bridgestone-Firestone, Dayton, Seiberling, and I suspect about about half dozen others with obscure Tn post office boxes. just shows you how good your Guvmint is at regulating anything. I worked at the Albany GA plant when I first quit college and it was Firestone then. The tires that came out said Firestone, Seiberling, Dayton, Atlas, Interstate, Montgomery-Ward, and many others. I was told that before I started at one point the URW struck Goodyear and they shipped molds and specs to Albany and built Goodyear tires there.
You will have to read between the lines and both sides of the page to get an idea who built the tires that you buy.
 
I was told that before I started at one point the URW struck Goodyear and they shipped molds and specs to Albany and built Goodyear tires there.
You will have to read between the lines and both sides of the page to get an idea who built the tires that you buy.

I myself am not concerned the least whether tires (or anything else I buy) is made by union or non-union workers. Its hard enough just trying to nail down made in USA at all. I will buy tires this weekend or early next week, I just choose to try and support the workers in the homeland, thats all.

TireRack.com will also tell you the country of origin. But how old and accurate is their information...hard to say. The DOT code will be your best tool to try and determine that.
 








 
Back
Top