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Search for tires to fit your car on Tire Rack and note where they are made. LOTS of tires still made here that also get good reviews.
All of the Tires I buy for my Antique and Classic Cars are now made off shore... even if they are American in Name...
I just did a Tire Rack Search and came up with nothing...
Their Car Tire Selector starts at 1980 for one make and my tires are not listed by size...
I bought all my Goodyear and Firestone Tires at Goodyear and Firestone shops and now they can't get them... even though they are still made overseas branded by Goodyear and Firestone...
Here's what Tire Rack has to say...
Country of Origin
Although regularly updated, the country of origin for any tire may vary from the country shown here. Unfortunately, we cannot accommodate requests for tires with a specific country of origin.
Last edited by Ultrarunner; 09-30-2009 at 03:51 PM..
Funny they say that - I think what most people want to say is "I don't want Chinese". That's what I think when I see "imported" - hey if it comes from Europe, from Brazil or Argentina, or from Japan, or Korea, it's probably fine...
I guess if you want to verify country of origin you have to buy them locally.
For whatever it's worth, I'll repeat that I have had good service out of *some* Chinese made tires, but as John titled the thread, it's a buyer-beware market. Unfortunately there are a *lot* of things that can be wrong with a tire that even a professional tire QA inspector can't see - because they are simply not visible once the rubber is on there. Might be possible to suss out problems with some sort of X-ray, ultrasonic imaging or whatever, but who has that?
Ultrarunner, probably you will find that Coker Tire has what you want - I don't know about American made antique tires, but here again Michelin seems to offer really good quality tires for damn near anything that was ever built with wheels. They must do it for the good Karma, hard to think they can make any real money with some of the oddball sizes they carry.
I've had lots of problems with USA made tires on everything from motorcycles to cars to pick-up trucks. And from the reports of tire failures on various vehicles that have made headlines, so have others ....
I've had more go-arounds with Michelin over crappy tires from them then you can imagine ... starting all the way back with XAS. The first sets on my BMW's were fine, gave good wear/handling, but then Michelin figured out how to lower the cost of production (but not the retail price!), and I had several sets that didn't give 8,000 miles of wear. Of course, no guarantee, no adjustment.
I've had Continental tires blow out catastrophically on my MB's, 240D's as well as 300Dt's.
I've had Pirelli's that wore like iron and I couldn't wait to get them off the car because they handled so badly. At 80,000 miles, they were still on the car when I sold it.
I've had Swedish tires that ran beautifully for many miles, and then the replacement set didn't last for a year.
I've had Dunlops and Avons last 50,000 miles, and some sets last only a few thousand.
I've seen customers' cars with all kinds of brands and price point tires, private labels, name brands ... with internal cord separation on new tires, resulting in poor handling and impossible to balance tires.
Where I'm going with this is that I've had exceptionally good and exceptionally bad tires from just about every manufacturer ... domestic, European, Asian, and Brazilian ....
I think it has a lot to do with the quality control of the product for each batch and the current cost cutting measures at each plant. You won't know what you've got until it's on the car. By no means does any manufacturer of passenger car road tires have a lock on "quality" .... domestic or foreign. You'll even see huge differences in tires of a series just by changing the tire size.
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