Firestone Tire Information
The firestone company started right around 1900. The original idea that Harvey Firestone wanted was to be involved in the auto industry. When they started out, Firestone was one of the top tire makers in the United States. They later became the largest in the world after their merge with Bridgestone.
History
Firestone started out as a Rubber and Tire company and surprisingly enough, they did not manufacture the tires they sold. This is very different from the brand we now know today. All they started doing was attaching the rubber tires to metal wheels. This lasted about 3 years until they got their first big order. In 1905, Ford Motor Company came to Firestone with a large order of 28,000 tires. They made total of $1 million in sales from
this order alone.
Racing
After the start of their company, racing became a "thing" throughout the world. In 1909, it was reported that the first Firestone tires were used in the Indianapolis 300 driven by Barney Oldfield. Interestingly enough, race tires were not invented until 1909, so before then, regular road tires were used.
The first Indy 500 was also won with Firestone tires. These tires were almost solely used on the racing lines until around 1967. Firestone decided to take a break from these races and held out until 2008, when they won again.
Additional to all of these wins, they also won the Formula 1 World Championship in 1968 and again in 1972. Firestone also supplied tires to different teams that were competing in the NASCAR competitions.
Recalls
Although Firestone had many ups, they would not be like any other company without an “oops.” You might remember hearing about the Firestone 500 tread separation problem. Firestone started experiencing different and major problems with their radial tires in the 1970's. Separation had been shown on the steel-belted radials although a cause was never proven. Many people have felt the failure was a result of the cement bonding not staying together at high speeds. When the investigation was launched, defects were found in design flaws in every single Firestone 500's.
Responding to this, the director of Firestone, Thomas A. Robertson said, "We are making an inferior quality radial tire which will subject us to belt-edge separation at high mileage." After this, quality control measures were put in force to help making any defaults on tires. A total of 7 million tires were recalled because of this error through 1978. Although the company first blamed the problems on under-inflation and the owners not keeping up with tire maintenance, the Congressional hearings said otherwise. This one mistake was said to take around 34 deaths.
Future
Firestone has gone through some bad and high points, bad publicity and millions of dollars in compensations to the victims of the errors really hurt them. The name was damaged greatly, but with their continued quality control, Firestone is getting stronger, once again.