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GOODYEAR TIRE & RUBBER COMPANY

29 October, 2015 - 17:03

Goodyear opened its International Technical Center in Luxembourg in 1957, with just three employees. Today, the Luxembourg operations has 1,000 workers and a big role in the company. The Akron, Ohio-based Goodyear had to scramble to compete with a foreign invention.

In the mid-1960s, Michelin, the big French tire maker, invaded the U.S. with its radial tire, which lasted far longer and provided better gas mileage then conventional bias-ply tires. Goodyear headquarters was caught napping. But its European operations had seen Michelin's success with radials early and had been making radials of its own.

"We took work done here on radials and built on that base in the U.S.," says Joseph M. Gingo, the director of the Luxembourg technical center. The base included tire-building machines and rubber compounds, which are different for radials than for bias-ply tires, and expertise in making steel-wire belts, which are not used at all in conventional tires.

More recently, Goodyear took technology it developed in Europe for high performance tires and brought it to the U.S .... Now the company is trying to transfer its all-season tires developed in the convenience-minded U.S. market to Europe ....

[In 1984] Goodyear launched the first joint new-product effort between its Luxembourg and Akron researchers. The company wants a new radial truck tire that will last longer than 150,000 miles, while being light in weight and low in road friction. "We're working on the tread design," says Mr. Gingo,

''while Akron is working on the bead"-the part that holds the tire to the wheel rim ....

To make such joint efforts easier, Goodyear is now installing direct desktop computer links between the Akron and Luxembourg technical centers.