The biggest car news and reviews, no BS
Our free daily newsletter sends the stories that really matter directly to you, every weekday.
The entire auto industry is in upheaval, let alone the rest of the world. And tires are downstream of all of that. When tariffs hit, the price of the raw materials spikes. When gas prices go up, people drive less, and replace their tires less often. When the price of everything goes up, people balk at spending $800 for a new set and more and more, opt for a cheap Chinese import over a legacy name like Goodyear.
On the latest episode of The Drivecast, Goodyear CEO Mark Stewart sat down exclusively with The Drive for a candid discussion about whether the company can actually grow its business by selling more expensive tires to fewer people, cautious support of tariffs, the competition to land lucrative deals with automakers for factory-equipped tires on new cars, and yes, the blimp. There was blimp talk.
Everyone knows the name Goodyear, everyone knows the Goodyear Blimp, but that visibility hasn’t kept it out of the woods recently. A net loss of $1.7 billion in 2025 and $249 million in the first quarter of 2026 have been attributed to weak consumer demand along with rising input costs, and of course we can’t overlook the competition from both China and South Korea among others. It’s had to consolidate plants, lay off thousands of employees, and take a hard look at itself.
Stewart’s been swift and divested Goodyear of its non-core assets, refocused the company on tire manufacturing, shifted from a regional to global centralized approach in the name of efficiency, and put a focus on more premium tires and sizes.
Tires are actually one of the most important aspects of a car’s performance and safety. It’s the only part of your car that actually touches the road. Good tires can transform the way it drives. Bad tires can turn it into a basket case. And bald tires can get you killed. You might say tires are important even if most people find them boring. But can the man tasked with figuring out how to save an iconic tire brand solidify the company’s future and make people say, “I want Goodyears?”
First time here? The Drivecast is The Drive‘s weekly podcast that takes you behind-the-scenes on the largest controversies, stories, and characters shaping the automotive industry along with the way our roads look today. Powered by The Drive‘s inside access, original reporting, exclusives, and insights, The Drivecast aims to make everyone an insider.
Listen to The Drivecast via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Amazon Music. Love it? Like it? Want to help? Leave a five-star review on your platform of choice to help get The Drivecast in front of more people. Have a suggestion, tip, request, or feedback? Drop us a line at feedback@thedrive.com. I promise, we read every single email.
Full Transcript
Joel: All right, so we are back and we have Mark Stewart, CEO of Goodyear Tires. Mark, I hear you’re a car enthusiast, and you actually have a small collection of cars, including a car that belonged to someone quite famous and talented. Is that accurate?
Mark: That is accurate. It was owned by my dad. Oh, wait, that’s not the one you’re talking about, is it? You’re not talking about my CJ-5. I got actually four years ago—I’m the proud next holder of Aretha Franklin’s 1986 Rolls-Royce Corniche II, black-on-black convertible. It is pretty badass, I’ve got to tell you.
Joel: Do you roll around in it?
Mark: Well, at the moment I have the roll-away board that I’ve been replacing the window lift motor. I will not tell you how many months it took me to figure out that jigsaw puzzle, but it was victory and success on Sunday. I finally got the old lift motor out so that I could put it back together and then roll around on it the proper way, behind the steering wheel.
Kyle: How did you end up getting that? That’s not something you stumble on, I imagine.
Mark: Yeah, it’s actually a pretty cool story. So, we had a retirement family house and the couple we bought it from, the guy, a New York guy, used to have this fashion brand in the ’70s and ’80s called The Italian Mob. And he used to dress all of the big Motown stars back in the day, including Aretha. And she was at his house one weekend, and it was in ’89, I think, so the car was three years old, and she’s like, “Ron, I’ve got to get rid of this beautiful car.” He’s like, “What is it about it?” She goes, “Well, the seats don’t go back far enough for me at this time, right?” As we know, she was a very vivacious lady. And so she sold the car to Ron, and Ron’s had it all these years. And Ron got to his early 80s, a couple years after I bought the house from Ron and his wife. He called, he goes, “I’ve been talking a lot about it. You guys are good friends. That’s a Detroit car. It needs to head back your way.” He goes, “I’m shipping it to you tomorrow. Figure out what it’s worth and write me a check.” I was like, “Done, done, and done.” So, I’ve had it ever since.
Kyle: The power of friendship. Well, congratulations on owning a piece of history there. And, you know, I have to know, Mark: Will Goodyear Tires supply the new tires for the new Days of Thunder movie? Not a reference—Joel put this question in the rundown. He’s the one who really wants to know.
Joel: I’ve got to know. I’ve got to know.
Kyle: Exclusive news here on The Drivecast.
Mark: I don’t know that we’ve—I’d do the phone-a-friend to Travis. I think even if we had that info, we would be embargoed at this time.
Joel: Oh, Mark, between friends you can tell us.
Mark: But, you know, given the success of Eagle F1 coming back out into the market and its prominent place in the number one Tire Rack, I think whether it’s on there or not, it’s the logical choice 100% that it should be on it, if it is or if it isn’t.
Kyle: We demand continuity here in this culture. It would be nice to see, but I guess we’ll stay tuned on that. Okay, so let’s dive in here. To start with the big question, Mark: it has been two and a half years since you were brought in to transform the company. What exactly led Goodyear to that point where it needed a transformation, and really what has changed since then?
Mark: Goodyear is such an iconic company, right? So, everybody knows the name Goodyear, everybody knows the blimp. But if you’re below a certain age category, you may not know that those blimps flying in all the major events around the country and around the world are tied to tires. And so that’s a little bit of the trajectory of Goodyear being such an iconic company with amazing products. But over the last 20 years, a lot of the marketing and advertising in tougher times got reduced significantly. As well, when you think about the market, the market has changed a lot when it comes to how people go to market, and Goodyear really was an inventor of some of the powerhouse marketing and advertising through the decades.
And without going away, thank goodness we still have that powerful relationship with NASCAR, powerful relationships on the European side with endurance racing, and going through the GTs and so forth, but we really need to bring that back. Goodyear was really struggling in terms of growth story. We bought Cooper in the ’21 time period coming out of COVID, but the world has changed a lot with the big influx of tires from Asia at a much different price point. And so, it’s really important that Goodyear meaningfully mix up in the profit pool in terms of really being back to performance, back into what we call the 18-inch and above, or the more modern or contemporary sizes. That’s where the profit pools are. And Goodyear had been really hanging in the large-volume middle, and that area was really getting attacked—really super attacked on low-price tires.
And so, in coming in, it was an honor to be able to come in. I grew up as a Dunlop baby, so coming back into the tire business from the side of actually working in it instead of being fed and clothed by it was really an important responsibility to come into the business and to lead that transformation to get it turned around, because Goodyear is really working hard to generate meaningful cash flow, to generate meaningful profits, and to secure the next 128 years of the company.
And so, we had to divest several non-core assets that really, when we think about the core of the business, it really is about our consumer tire business that everybody knows from the racing world and all of the great history that we have there, same thing on the commercial side, and aviation. We’ve got 30-plus percent of the world market share in aviation so that we could focus. So, we paid down the debt, get our balance sheet as healthy as it’s been in 30 years, and we cut a lot of the things out of the system that was not about cutting our way to success, but it was about right-sizing the business for profitability.
Kyle: Got it. It’s well-known that we’ll come back to the motorsport stuff and the blimp. I do want to talk about the blimp. I mean, who doesn’t want to talk about the blimp? But on a more serious note, part of this did involve a number of layoffs. It was earlier this year that you guys announced a number of plants would be consolidated and closed. I think it was about 1,700 jobs being cut in North Carolina.
Mark: Yeah, North Carolina, yes.
Kyle: How does the restructuring look now, and are there any plans for continued consolidations going forward? Is the plan complete, and now it’s about just optimizing the structures that remain?
Mark: The last two and a half years has been about what we call the Goodyear Forward program, which was specifically around divesting those three assets: the Dunlop brand and namesake, the chemical business, and then the mining business, or OTR as we call it. Because again, Goodyear had underinvested in quite frankly all three of those, and one was kind of a messy part of the world with Dunlop. We had part of the world, one of the competitors had the other part of the world, so it’s hard to invest in a brand that you’re not getting a global reach from, right? So, those things made sense and needed to happen from a business perspective, to your point, right?
We’re talking about our Goodyear family of folks, right, and a lot of folks that are multi-generations of families in the company. It’s something we definitely take very seriously, but something that we had to do to address our cost structure, also to address the supply and the demand of each of the marketplaces. When we look at some of the—particularly what we said, the tier one or the upper tier, the premium tires; tier two, close second; and then tier three, tier four—much more to the price points and in older parts of the car park at lower rim sizes. As that market just got taken over by low-cost imports, we just could not compete in that space. In Europe as well as in the U.S., it’s very challenging.
When we’ve got our cost structures in place, we all enjoy our lifestyles in the Western zone here, but we just couldn’t compete against a tire that was costing $10 or $12 to make as opposed to $85 or $89 to make. It’s a massive—even with tariffs, it was not enough to help in that. We appreciated the tariff legislation in our marketplaces to give us time, and we’ve been doing a lot of automation, a lot of renovation, a lot of upgrading and modernization of our sites, but when you’ve got that kind of delta, it’s difficult.
Joel: You’ve actually, Mark, hit a lot of points that are questions we want to talk about today. You’ve teed off a lot of questions Kyle and I were coming into this with.
Kyle: You primed the pump.
Joel: You primed it all up. And I’m going to let Kyle take—we’re going to circle back to a bunch of stuff as we go through this, but I actually do want to talk—you mentioned about how you coming in and your history and everything, and I wanted to just delve into that, because your history and your past is from Stellantis, right? It’s actually not in tires. And tires, as you mentioned—you used the word family—this is a very historical business, it’s a historical name, it’s a historical industry, people are generational, which, by the way, is a lot of the things you could say for automakers, right? People that work for Ford, Stellantis, and GM. But your background’s not tires. As a tire outsider now in charge of this historic tire brand that is, again, full of multi-generational people, I am curious how you view, as you come into this table to turn this company around as a tire outsider, your experience coming from Stellantis.
Mark: I would tap even before Stellantis as well, Joel, right? I grew up in the tier one auto space in a company, TRW, started off down the road in Cleveland, actually, probably 35–40 minutes from our headquarters here in Akron. And that was in brakes, and steering, and seat belts, airbags, and radars and cameras and that type of thing. So, also very much a legacy company, 100-plus years old, right? Then going to FCA, becoming Stellantis, the same thing, 100-year-plus histories. And just all those things over the years gathering in my toolbox, and the things of going through different cycles of growth, of transformation, of turnarounds and mergers, divestitures, and all of those things were very helpful for all of them coming in for the Goodyear transformation.
Whether you’re dealing with the car design and the final production, but all of the components going into it, and certainly similar to my past in TRW with a steering wheel, seat belts, etc., and the brakes, you’re interacting with that consumer or that vehicle every single time from that part of the tier one, just like on tires. If you’ve got great rolling resistance, if you’ve got great performance, great stopping distance, the end consumer sees that every day, just like they do in the OEM space.
But just like in the OEM space, as I mentioned earlier, this cost to produce or cost to convert a tire is so important, right? Because at the end of the day, it really is about our ability to produce something that the OEMs can afford to buy, produce something that the end consumer can buy at one of our retailers or our partners in the retail space, and at the same time us have the ability to make money on it. And so, just that attention to cost detail—details matter. Details matter in Stellantis, details matter in terms of the tire business as well, and at the end of the day it’s all about people in both, right? It really is about: what is our mission, what are the KPIs we’re driving to, how are we doing against those, and what do we need to do differently?
Kyle: That all makes sense. Something you said earlier also kind of solidified the connection in my mind, the parallels between the OEM space and the tire space, and that’s the fight against lower-priced imports taking your business, right? Like that’s the whole game in the automotive industry right now, and the same is true of tires. I was interested to hear you say that you appreciated the tariffs—the tariff actions—is that an accurate statement? Because I know obviously that you’re dealing with the imports, as we just said, and so tariffs could help take a bite out of that. But at the same time, it’s also adding to your costs, right? Because you’re importing a lot of raw materials, you also source a number of tires—a lower percentage, but still significant—from non-USMCA countries. So overall, would you say the tariffs have been good for business, neutral, or slightly negative, or where has that landed?
Mark: It depends on where in the world, Kyle, right? Because for us, when you think about it, wherever possible, we make in-region for that region, like within a USMCA zone, within Europe, within Asia, and so forth. There’s a few exceptions to that, but by far and large, that is the bulk of our stuff here in the US, coming from US or USMCA—a little bit on the outside zone, especially when it comes to the consumer business. But that’s where, again, for us, because we have such a large U.S. footprint, and then in Europe we’ve got a large European footprint too, so for each of those geographies, localized tariffs, things coming from offshore in, should be a benefit, right? Overall, as far as, yeah, you get everybody—everybody’s on par with a tariff for raw material, but a finished product coming in, it can be a differentiator to help gain time for more modernization in the plants to be able to be competitive and make money on those.
By far and large, as we’ve shared in our earnings results, though, the amount of those tariffs versus the conversion cost of where some of the products were coming from, it was not enough to make a substantial difference. What we actually saw happen last year was a pre-buy. So, there was a lot of pre-buy as the tariffs were announced, where distribution really had a big stock-up of low-end product that had to work its way through the system, and then we started seeing some better results on the tariffs towards the end of last year and into this year.
And then within Europe, by the way, a new set of tariffs or duties on foreign products coming from Asia, and China specifically, into the Europe market had just gone into effect in the last month. That was about a year and a half or two years of investigation from the EU Commission. We believe as an industry that that should help for the next 12 to 18 months until those tires get repositioned somewhere else in the world.
Kyle: Do you think that absent the tariffs, if low-cost imported tires, especially from China, were just allowed to flood the market here, do you think that would be an existential thing for a business like yours or for the whole tire industry that’s based in America?
Mark: I think it’s really a big part of us going into the Goodyear Forward transformation, right? It really was an existential thing when you think about—we were used to serving all parts of the market, right, every price point. And then the market in the last 20 years has changed so drastically, and in the last—since COVID especially—even more so in terms of the amount of tires in that low end coming into the space. And again, it’s why it’s so important for Goodyear to re-embrace our historic icon status and say, “Hey, we’re Goodyear.” It’s why in our marketing campaign, right, we went back out, we started—you guys have seen it, hopefully still, right, our “Still” commercial, that was really a nod to our past in terms of performance, you know, the lunar tires on the Moon, all of the racing success, and just all of the tech advancements that Goodyear provided in the industry. And then from the look back to “still” and “forever.” We’re still doing it and we’re forever going to do it, right?
And that’s why, again, we continue on this drumbeat of continuing to refresh the products and the marketing. Some of our products were a little long in the tooth, and you could do that before. Things staying in the marketplace longer, but products have to be refreshed much faster with other tires coming into the marketplace, different performance criteria, and it’s why Goodyear had to move up so that we can use the cost base that we have. We have to have a different value proposition for customers. Meanwhile, we need customers to go in and say, “Hey, I need Goodyear products on this,” whether it’s a Goodyear, a Cooper, or Kelly, Mastercraft, whatever it is.
Joel: Obviously, customers could be someone like a consumer, Kyle and me, right? But that’s a onesie-twosie customer. A real—and people that are—I know a lot of people actually that work in the industry listen to this podcast. A lot of customers and volume in this business comes from suppliers to OEMs, right? You are a tier one supplier. Just like you sell tires to Kyle and I at a consumer level, you are a tier one supplier to automakers, and you guys are on—historically, and I’m not going to quote right this second, but you’ve been on everything from F-150s and Broncos to Wranglers, etc., and the Goodyear name is synonymous with these things. And I know I just mentioned trucks and SUVs, but you’re on cars, too. But what I was going to ask you about is: the competition for OEM business, has it changed from when maybe you were at Stellantis as an automaker itself, and what that looks like today?
Mark: Well, it’s one of the things in coming to Goodyear, of doing a bit of a fresh-eye look on it, and really amping up our OEM business, right? Because we are predominantly aftermarket, as an industry most are, right? But we are between 20 and 30 percent of our business is to OEMs. We’ve moved that up between 3 and 5 percent just over the last year with successful new bids, new partnerships. So for me coming in, it was like, guys, it’s really important that we have the partnership with the procurement teams at the OEMs, but also with the technical teams, right?
The tighter we can get in with the upfront engineering and development for—whether it’s a low rolling resistance tire that’s needed to help a Monroney label, whether it is a new tire for hybrids or EV fitments that are going to have those batteries with the extra weights so that folks can have that—the vehicle engineers, the dynamics folks can have their ride and handling that they’re looking for, but then entering into that downstream for the customer, the end consumer getting it, it’s like, “Oh wow, I just chewed through these tires. I’ve got to get them fast.” And that causing a problem for both a Goodyear as well as an OEM, right, of a dissatisfaction event. So again, working more closely with the engineering community and the procurement community is super important, right?
And then you have a little styling, right? Differentiated products. And I’ve been a big push on us going back in, and I always laugh, it’s like, yes, with my white sidewalls on my hair, it’s like, we should bring white sidewalls back to the tires, something where people can see the Goodyear name, right? They can see the Cooper name. And we’re doing some cool stuff with that, by the way. Unfortunately, not on my hair, but we’re doing it with the tires, so.
Kyle: For the record, I fully support that. Lettering on white lettering on tires, white-wall tires, like, let’s bring those back. I mean, I’m sort of joking, but I’m also not, because to the points you were making earlier, like, attention is everything, right? Like attention is everything today, and tires are ubiquitous. I don’t know, I just think that there is a lot of ways that, you know, visually you could stand out, but also the cultural connection to that, and like, I don’t know. Personally, I think any car looks better with white letters on the tires. Like, it stands out. It’s a cool thing. I think you should do it.
Joel: We are going to come back to that topic. It’s very important and it’s on our question list. But before we move on from the OEM and the competition, and I know Kyle has questions about where tires are made and all that in a second here, I do want to ask, following on this OEM business talk: so, one of the more recent trends, this was definitely not something when I started in the industry that was as prevalent as it is today. Look, you came from Stellantis. You know as an automaker, every 10 cents on a light bulb counts, right? Every dollar on a tire counts. And I have witnessed in the last—I actually want to say 10 years, but honestly, the amount, how prevalent it’s become in the last 5 years is alarming to me.
Cars on manufacturers launching a vehicle with what I would consider a tier one tire, right? So, Goodyear, Michelin, Pirelli, etc. And it’s a big deal. And usually, if it’s not a car that’s an enthusiast car—so, either a sports car, an off-road car, or a truck—it doesn’t get—most people aren’t paying as much attention in journalism at tires. But when you get in a Bronco or a Mustang, you’re darn well paying attention to the rubber on that car. And then what I’m noticing is, is that after—usually it’s model year three or four, but even I’ve seen it on model year two, if we’re really trying to get cheap—I’ve watched as they quietly swap out those tires and do a running change for the next model year or two, and they save a ton of cost. So, you might go from a Goodyear or a Pirelli or Michelin, and suddenly—and by the way, I just, I know people are like, “Well, give us an example.” I watched a Wrangler launch with tires that were tier one, and now you buy Wranglers with Nexens. They did not launch with Nexen tires, but they saved a ton of money. Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid also launched with Michelins, and they swapped them out on year three. So, these are just examples, and I know those are both Stellantis examples, but they are not alone. Everyone is doing this. This is not a Stellantis thing, it is an industry thing.
But I am curious how that’s affecting your business, because as you’re developing these relationships, you’re developing tires for a specific model, and then all of a sudden they change it. That really dramatically affects your business—everyone in the tire supply business.
Mark: What I would say, though, is tariffs are a disruptor to that, Joel, right? Getting back to: Has it been good or what has it been for the business side? And I’ll say, you know, since the tariffs came in, meaningful discussions with the OEMs and some stuff that has been mid-cycle resourced to our team, to Goodyear, that’s actually happened and launching now, right, for that side. But it goes back to—to your point, right? We’re all under the pressure, right? OEMs are under pressure, the tiers are under pressure, certainly tire makers were under the pressure to the cost side.
So, that’s why, again, being our very best in terms of fine-tune, fine-point, what we can do to make things the absolute most competitive we can, so that there’s margin and performance built into there on a balance. But, and it ties back to the other, right? Also, those balanced discussions with procurement, with engineering, and ultimately tying back to the end consumer, because that’s what we’re all here for, right? It goes back to, if you’re not happy with that performance, right—and a big part of performance does come from tires—that it’s super important that we’re all beating the drum on that, too. So, we’ve seen some great progress, right, in our growth with the D3, as we talk about here in the local market, and beyond the D3, right, across the localized manufacturers in the U.S., particularly in the last year and a half.
Kyle: Speaking of localized manufacturing, we talked about the plant consolidations earlier, but I’m curious: Where does “Made in America” actually stand now with all the stuff, all the work you guys have done to restructure the business and make it workable in today’s landscape, especially when the imports aren’t going away? I mean, it may get more expensive to bring them in, but also Goodyear’s not just an American business. Like, you sell tires all around the world. So, where does Made in America actually stand now, and what’s it look like going forward?
Mark: No, it’s a great question. For us, we like to make in the region for that region, right? Because with 128 years under our belt, right, and selling in pretty much every country we’re all allowed to sell in, right, is one that we’ve got a product that is coming from within that region. So, we really do want to be local, we want to be part of the community—communities that we live in, that we work in, that we sell in, and that people buy in. So, for us, that stays very important in our DNA, right, that we’re able to do that.
And it’s why we have been investing so much within our local plants to make them to where we can produce, but we can’t produce a tier four tire and expect to be able to make money off of that. That’s why we have deprecated or we’ve really been rationalizing older SKUs and SKUs that, again, fall to the lowest end of those specifications that, again, part of it is about our brand image, and we are working very hard to position Goodyear in that tier one space, and our Cooper solidly in that upper tier two space, and then have our Kelly, our Mastercraft, and our Starfire brands here in this marketplace have the portfolio that we need so that we can do shelf space in the aftermarket for all of our customers, so that we’ve got the right thing for the OEMs for that particular platform that they’re looking for, as well. But super focused on the premium of those 18-and-aboves that the OEMs are running, because that’s where Goodyear can be successful.
Kyle: Yeah, I do understand that. And actually, it’s funny because it lines up with something Joel and I were discussing, not related to tires, but I think it does apply here, at least it’s worth asking, before we started recording, and that’s that there are a lot of industries right now that are focused on chasing the whales, because that’s where the profit margins lie. As you go for the customer that can spend more, that’s looking for more specialized product, and that, at least projection-wise, shows much more growth than trying to compete for this shrinking middle. Do you worry at all that you’re going to run out of specialty buyers, you’re going to run out of people looking who want to think a lot about which tire they buy and cross-shop and compare, and OEMs looking for a tire to fit their latest big SUV that needs to meet all these engineering requirements? Like, is there a ceiling on where you can go with this strategy as opposed to the way the company used to operate?
Mark: To be fair, right, Goodyear, we talked about it for a long time, but we weren’t actioning the mix-up into the premium space. So, we had a lot of blank space or white-space products that were not in the market, of certain segments we just weren’t participating in. So, we’re talking many, many millions of tires of opportunity where we just didn’t have a fitment that would fit that. So, as we move forward into the future space, we still see lots of room in terms of the ability for us to go in there with our performance characteristics. Our engineers are wicked with the compounding and the development and the tread patterns, so that we know, just like with our new Eagle F1 All Season, right, we can come out with a number one product in the marketplace.
So, if we get in the boxing ring, we know we can box it out and win. And so, from that standpoint, we’ve got lots of room with that. We’re not abandoning the middle, right, but we are moving away from being a mass producer in the lowest ends of the segment. But we will offer a full portfolio string for all of the customers, that’s for sure.
Kyle: Including with white letters on the tires, right?
Mark: And yellow as well.
Kyle: Heck yeah. Heck yeah.
Joel: Kyle just really has latched onto that and he wants to jump to it. He’s skipping over.
Mark: I’m glad he did, then. I’m super glad he did. It’s awesome.
Joel: We’re going to come back to that. Just mark my words, okay, boys? So, Mark, I’ve got to tell you, I’m not sure we’ve ever had a guest on here that parlays his answers in the next question so seamlessly. Very impressive work. I was actually going to talk to you—you know, my wife tells me all the time, “You guys live in a silo, you’re enthusiasts, you’re out of touch with consumers,” because I live in this world, right? Like, cars to me aren’t daunting, buying a car isn’t scary. But she’s like, “A general consumer isn’t you, Joel. You guys are so blinded by the world you live in.” And so this actually is a question she’ll be so proud of me when she listens to the proof of this podcast, which she loves doing.
I’ve got plenty of friends that are simply not car enthusiasts—Kyle will never believe it—and tire talk would make their eyes gloss over. But a serious question I do get all the time from these non-car enthusiast people, because everybody needs tires, doesn’t matter whether you like cars or not, is: Why do tires cost so much? And specifically, is a $200 tire twice as good as a $100 tire, or are we just paying for a brand name? And I think it’s a really valuable question when we’re talking to a tier one tire supplier who is trying to compete, and is competing, with lower, newer entry-point tire brands.
Mark: I think it goes to, while to your point, right, there’s those of us in the enthusiast category that go through every speed rating, break distance, wet, dry, snow, you name it, and there’s others that, “Ah, crap, I’ve got a flat tire, I have to change it,” and they all need to look good, so it is apples and oranges. So, I think it goes to, first of all, segmenting the consumer base, right, about what are different folks looking for, right? Is it the enthusiast, the high performance? Is it the enthusiast that, “I want the look, but it doesn’t need to go to the sand dunes this weekend, I just want it to be on the road, look cool, and not make the sounds, right? I want to look that way without it.”
Then there’s the buyer that needs to bundle with other things, right, other services that retailers or ourselves would offer. And I think making sure that our messaging is to those folks and on point, to make it from either a grudge buy or “I don’t care” buy into, “Well, you know what, I care a little bit. Hey, these tires involve your safety every time you get in it. Don’t you want to pay a little bit more to make sure you’ve got the best engineering that could possibly happen to make these tires so that they’re not going to fail, you’re not going to have a blowout, you’re not going to have an instant lose-all-your-air kind of moment and lose control of your car? At the same time, these are going to last, right? They’re going to last 60, 70, 80,000 miles, and you really don’t have to worry about that because you’re going to be in your next car by that point in time.”
So, I think it really is from our side, it goes into really segmenting that consumer base for what people are looking for and finding a care point for that, right? Because even though people may not care about tires, they care about the outcomes that a tire input can do. And there are very different input costs on a $200–$300 tire than there is on a $40–$50–$100 tire, right? And it’s around the compounds, and what those compounds do in terms of—and it’s not just high performance, right, but it really is about how they handle in wet, how they handle in dry, how they handle in the heat, or how they handle in the snow, on grade, how long they’re going to last, and all of those things enter into it. I know that sounds like enthusiast talk as well, right, but those are just some practical, daily things of how we all need to sell the tires to folks that it’s not their favorite, glamorous thing to buy, right? But we love the enthusiasts that it is their glamorous thing to buy, as well, so.
Joel: I will tell you, we just put new tires on our 1990 300ZX, and I was excited. Like, I do get excited about tires. I will just tell you, like, it was—that was a fun day. Like, I drove it into the shop, and it was like, that was my afternoon, and it was a highlight of the week. And then I drove out of there, I’m like, “Oh, listen to how quiet they are, listen to how soft they are, listen to how…” like, anyway.
But the moment that Kyle’s waited for dearly, it’s ironic this is my question, so he’s just going to have to sit here and smile. But the moment we’re coming back to, we’re coming back to the white walls, boys. So, I did have a question, honest to God, this is in the rundown. Goodyear’s always been an outlier in terms of tires in the—and I say that in a good way—in the way that you’ve intertwined so much of the marketing and cultural history with the brand, right? So, the blimps, and Le Mans, and the Lunar Rover, and all of that stuff, which, I mean, they’re intertwined with tires, but like, they’re cultural things, these are cultural marketing moments. And yes, the blimp still exists, and we touched a little about this earlier, but the question I was going to ask you is: Do you think it’s been a mistake for Goodyear to not be more involved in current cultural modern history, and more importantly, will it get more involved, and in what ways might we see that? Because cultural moments, attention, that’s everything in today’s viral environment, right? A reel, we’ve all seen the bodycam footage of me almost getting arrested for Grand Theft Auto a couple weeks ago, we had millions of views on that in minutes. And so I think that those kind of cultural moments, I remember the Toyota Tundra towing the space shuttle through LA, that was a cultural moment, right, and that went viral. How do you guys plan on capitalizing on that as you go forward? I know we touched on this topic a little earlier.
Mark: Absolutely. Again, for 100 of 128 years, now 101, the blimp has been there, right, for every major event, not just sporting events, but huge events around the world, the blimp has been there, meaning Goodyear’s been there. And so for us, it is—we pulled back way too much from participating in those. And the pride inside the company is as huge as it was 100 years ago, right? Meanwhile, we forgot to tell people about these great products and these great things and missing those moments. So, for me, that was a critical step for us to pivot and meaningfully do that, right?
And so, we are doing those things, right, as far as for the 100th year last year, we had 100 cities across the US. I look at the efficiency and the utilization of the blimp the same way I would at a tire building machine in a plant, right, because it is our most powerful marketing element, and by the way, they need to sell tires. When I first came in, it was a joke with part of Travis’s team with Doug Grassian and the team, and it was like, “Hey, could we use these to sell some tires?” And of course, yeah, they got all funny with it and made these T-shirts that, “Hey, blimps are cool, buy Goodyear tires.” And those T-shirts went viral, right?
And so, it just got things kind of started, because people love the Goodyear merch, right? It’s just a cool part of Americana, and even six months back or whatever, Sweeney was on the cover of GQ in an old-school Goodyear shirt, and they’re like, “Man, that was awesome. How did you guys do that?” It was like, she did it on her own, there was no collab, it was like she was on it, right? So, there’s still a pull for that.
And so, this past year, right, we were at Coachella, we’re really collaborating with a lot of influencers, a lot of stuff with Ice-T and some historical nods as well, and just a lot of fun things, but finding ways to be part of culture, right, the way Coachella has become, and the way so many other things across. And it’s important that we’re part of that, right? And it’s again why our latest commercial too, kind of “The Fast is in Us,” is another nod to that also, right? When you’re a kid in your room, and you’ve got your little plastic race track out and you’re fighting it out with your buddies, you know, for the pole position and to be the winner, and that’s really what that is, to generate that excitement that we all had, right, to race, to win, to have fun when you’re a kid.
And that’s what we’re doing now when you fast forward to introducing some of these concept stores around the country with us launching one in Detroit here next weekend, a destination place to go to, right, where people can come and hang out, have cars and coffee, chill out, buy Goodyear merchandise, not just the tire that you may or may not want to buy if you’re an enthusiast, but have fun with it, right, and to put ourselves back at the center of something fun. And I think that classic enthusiast store is a start to it that we plan to do a lot more of.
Kyle: You know, you finally brought up the blimp. Now we can finally talk about the blimp. No, I think Goodyear is a brand that has a lot of nostalgic connotations for people, and the history is very apparent, and even the logo itself is—I’m so glad you guys haven’t changed that, by the way. Like, don’t make a sans-serif logo like everyone else, please keep some character in the brand image. I think we’re all desperate for that.
Mark: There’s been some OE learnings on that in recent years, right? We would not want to, yeah.
Kyle: Exactly, exactly. But it is a brand, I think, that people are hungry for a reason to care about it and to have it in their lives and dedicate their attention to it for however long they do. The blimp, I think, is fascinating because, first of all, you guys are like the only blimp operators in America, and there’s only a—how many blimps—isn’t every—there’s some stat like, all the blimps in America are Goodyear blimps because there are no other blimps outside of military stuff, right?
Mark: Sometimes they masquerade a little bit. So, back to Joel’s earlier comment, right, we are in a collaboration right now actually with Grand Theft Auto for the 6 release, so it’s reskinned, there’s a Grand Theft Auto and Goodyear co-branding, so another thing about some pivotal moments there. But anyway, sorry, go ahead.
Kyle: So, my unserious question is: Do you get free rides in the blimp as CEO? Like, can you just pick up the phone and be like, “I want to take a blimp flight today, get one ready”?
Mark: So, the nice thing with one being housed 10 minutes from here is they’re always headed to somewhere, so you can hitch a ride, right? It would be in bad taste of me, right, to call up and ask for that unless it was already hopefully on the way somewhere else to do something else if I’m thrifty people about making sure we’re competitive and not wasting blimp money, either. But it’s, yeah, it’s pretty cool. And I did actually use a privilege once upon a time. My mom’s 80th birthday, I took my mom up in the blimp. So, that was pretty cool.
Kyle: That’s awesome. I mean, if I was becoming CEO of Goodyear, that would be in my negotiation process for the final terms of the job. It’s like: Day one, ride in the Goodyear blimp. But on a more relevant note, I’m very curious about how it actually works for you guys. I assume the blimp is like a marketing line item. So, correct me if I’m wrong there, and also, how do you decide where to send it? Because there’s only four, and there are lots of events all around the country. I live in LA, and so I see it, you know, every couple of months floating above some sporting event that’s going on, but how do you guys decide where to put it, and how do you track what you’re getting out of that attention?
Mark: Yeah, so you’re right, there’s four, and three of them are housed in the U.S, one is in Europe. One is in Carson City, right, not so far from you, and then we’ve got one in Pompano Beach, one here in Akron. It’s one of our premier advertising marketing tools that we’ve got in the toolbox, but we are very fortunate to have such strong relationship with the networks, also with sports in terms of, whether it’s PGA, whether it’s with college football and NFL football, you name it, NFL Draft, we have so many partnerships that we do.
And also helps offset the cost, right, where we’re actually filming games as well from the blimp, so we’ve got a staff of 14 that are there on part of the air coverage is with us as well, so that’s a pretty cool fun factoid on the blimp, as well. But it really, as we look on an annual basis, right, we try to look, back to your point, right, what are the things happening, you know, around the world, particularly in the U.S. and in Europe, over the course of the next year? So, which ones are we already a part of, which ones make sense for us to be a part of? Coachella was one of those, right, as we look to that, NFL Draft was one of those, right? Having it in Detroit for that moment was super special.
And again, looking at where it’s going for things, that it’s headed to a ballgame, okay, what is between Akron and wherever it’s headed, or Florida where it’s headed, California, etc., and finding ways to activate it, right, for our customers, to utilize with the end consumers, and ways just to keep the excitement about the blimp. So, that’s how we think about it.
Kyle: So, interesting, so you guys get paid for filming the games or whatever you’re covering, like you get money through that from the network or from the league.
Mark: Yeah, we get some money through that as well, which is very helpful.
Kyle: Yeah, I wouldn’t have thought about that. I mean, it is crazy that your entire company that operates blimps, right? Like, just objectively, if you take out the history of it, and the fact that we all know what it is, if you just wrote that down on paper, it’s like: We make tires and we fly blimps. Doesn’t really line up, but it’s a very unique thing, like there’s no other company that has that in their repertoire.
Mark: Well, it was 100 years ago, 90 years ago, we produced blimps ourselves, right? That was a product from the rubber, because the package in itself actually was rubber, and I don’t know if you guys have heard that story, but in World War II, we were part of the air patrol that was on lookout and helping to protect and give insights into the fleet, the allied fleets of looking for subs and other battleships out in the zone, so to speak. So, that’s the history on the Goodyear side.
On the Cooper side, we got a really interesting one, too, by the way. We have done a little tweaks on both the Goodyear and the Cooper brands back to more of our historical branding in terms of the fonts, the colors, and really getting ourselves back to a classic look, and with Cooper, we did exactly that. Cooper has also a similar kind of thing in World War II of supporting with rubber dinghies, right, with the rubber boats for the allies, as well, so that was a side product they made, cause so many people made other things during wartime.
Kyle: Yeah, no, it is fascinating, it’s a fascinating history. Speaking of history, and then I’ll let Joel get back in, because I’ve been monopolizing this for a minute, the attention, the activations, the cultural moments: Motorsports kind of having a thing in the last five years, and obviously F1 is a huge part of that. You guys left F1 in, I think it was 1998, but what I think a lot of people who especially are new to the sport wouldn’t realize is that you guys actually have the most Grand Prix victories in terms of a tire supplier. That’s going to be surpassed by Pirelli this year, because they’re the sole one right now, but still, Goodyear had a very long and prosperous history with F1. Do you see any world in which that is something you would want to compete for or even look at again, and if not, what else in motorsport is really catching your attention?
Mark: Well, race in general is really important to us, and coming back in, again, for me, of us with this pivot point, back into performance, and our internal mission is clear: number one in tires and service, and what better way to show your number one than being on a podium every week? The beauty of our NASCAR one is we’re always on the podium every week, that’s pretty awesome, right? In terms of Le Mans as well, you know, in our tire categories with 70% of those tires ours, same, same.
But we created the global race team, so we brought all of our race teams together, you know, into one team so that we could really work on our development for bringing ourselves back into the other parts of racing where we’re not. So, certainly, we would want to be in a position to where we could compete for a tender like that in the upcoming years as things become available. And we’ve been doing proof points throughout the course of the last two years in different races in the U.S. and across Europe, and our race engineers have come out with some unbelievably wicked tires that are getting great, great traction, no pun intended. But no, they’re getting great feedback from the race teams around the world. We were just in Imola last month and had some just unbelievable great feedback from the Ferrari, from the BMW M Racing Team folks. Just super impressed that, hey, we are back, right? We’re back, we’re developing, and we’re looking for those opportunities.
Joel: Goodyear is intertwined with motorsport, right, and theoretically, hopefully, right, race on Sunday, sell on Monday, that’s the goal, right? But you also, and as you mentioned, you’re on the podium all the time with Goodyear on NASCAR and everything, but you just mentioned all the stuff that you’re learning engineering-wise, whether it’s Imola, with Ferrari, any of this stuff, I’m curious: Can you expand on and explain some of the tire tech and developments you’re getting out of NASCAR, and racing as a whole, right, because it’s not just NASCAR you guys are in?
Mark: Oh, absolutely. The, from a kind of advanced mobility side of the house, on sensing and what we call SightLine, on the inside. So, we’ve actually got the sensing on the track all around the world every weekend. So, we—our engineering and our race teams like to say “from race to road.” So, we’re doing early developments that we put into play in the race, and then we industrialize them for serial production with the OEMs, and then to the end consumers, as well. So, it’s a fantastic way to develop it.
Our SightLine technology is it, right? So, in terms of all the way from basic, just what’s old-school tire pressure monitoring, but then going to, yeah, here’s what’s happening to the tread, here’s what’s happening to the performance of those tires, and we can tie that back in to that vehicle dynamic system to better control the vehicle, right, and to better—one, make the racing safer. On the road within consumers through the OEMs, be able to, if something happens, be able to tie in with that vehicle dynamics system and get to the side of the road safely. So, that absolutely is hand-in-hand, and the SightLine technology that the team has developed here is unbelievably great. And so, we’re really looking forward to launching that from, again, on the tracks every weekend into serial production with several OEMs.
Kyle: You know, it’s interesting that you pointed to the SightLine as one of the developments that’s come out of your collaboration with NASCAR, because I did want to ask you about the concept of smart tires in general. To be honest, in the past, I have rolled my eyes a bit at all these tire companies coming out with smart tire concepts, because it’s a tire, like, how smart does it need to be? We already have tire pressure monitoring. What, you know, the seemingly incremental gains that a driver will actually see and benefits that they’ll actually see from having much more advanced sensors in the tire, or a sensor that’s actually connected to some cloud server that can help it determine algorithmically what the weather’s like and what the conditions are and alert the driver. Like, it, I think it ties into the larger concern that a lot of people have that like all this stuff that we’ve made, all these smart devices, do we actually need them, and what’s happening to the data and the privacy of it? And it’s just, it’s a moment where I think a lot of people are reconsidering the trade-offs we’ve made over the last 10, 15 years as a society, not just within the tire industry.
But how are you guys looking at smart tires? Is it a really core part of the next 10 years, is it something that you’re kind of going to continue to work on and develop, or just how are you looking at that?
Mark: I think it’s got potential to really be a part of the core, and the reason being, as you said, right, it’s less to the data privacy concerns and so forth, because it really can be car-contained, right? It’s not about—if it’s a commercial fleet, absolutely, right, we’re monitoring, we’re inflating, deflating, and helping them optimize their cost of ownership. But when it comes to a consumer and passenger vehicle tires, it really is about the safety of that driver and their family in the car, because it goes to—if you get into, you’re right, TPMS has been around a long time, right? Okay, it’s nice to know what pressure is. But if you’ve got a rapid air loss, right, you hit something, to where your tire can signal that control unit in the car, again, you’ve got to stop, right? You’ve got to get over safely and stop, and it takes over, like auto emergency braking, right? It’s saved a lot of lives. This has the potential to save a lot of lives in terms of somebody having a blowout and doing a reactive steering move, as opposed to: you’ve got a rapid air loss and then the vehicle dynamics system takes over, gets you to the side of the road safely without you having to try to course-correct and wind up making a situation worse, right? So, I think it’s got huge potential, it really can make a difference, right? It can make a difference in: Did you stop before you hit somebody, did you get to the side of the road, or it’s the “go change your tires now, you’re out of tread,” right? You don’t want to be in the next rain or storm in this thing.
Joel: That is a good marketing slogan: “Did you stop and not hit somebody? Do you need new tires? Smart tires, buy Goodyear.” I’m just saying, free idea.
Kyle: We’re solving problems here. And then one last quick question, and I know we’re right at time here, but one last quick question: Airless tires, is that ever going to be a thing? Is that just, we’re just messing around with that, like, I feel like that’s never going to be a thing.
Mark: I’m going to give that one the crystal ball, right? I think they are cool, they are super cool. Every time I go to Le Mans, we’ve got the airless tires on our go-karts scooting around, and it gets more looks and more attention when you’re cruising around Le Mans in that go-kart with the airless tires. But really, when you think about driverless cars, from that standpoint, there is a real value to that product for that, where you don’t have to worry about the things we just talked about. Meanwhile, with the SightLine, you can deal with it that way, too. So, there’s a way to deal with that, there’s some complexities in the engineering side of the airless tires that the team has done a great job of working through on that, but when you think about manufacturability of those tires and the cost to do that versus the SightLine sensing, I think it depends on a use case. But for sure for driverless taxis, there’s a strong use case for that.
Joel: I know we went way over time, Mark. Thank you for coming on, we will absolutely have you back. It was too much fun.
Kyle: Just skimming the surface here.
Joel: Really appreciate your time.
Mark: Now, thank you, guys. Good to see you.
Kyle: Yeah, thanks, Mark.
As Director of Content and Product, Joel draws on over 15 years of newsroom experience and inability to actually stop working to help ensure The Drive shapes the future of automotive media. He’s also a World Car Award juror.
