Firestone Tire and Rubber Company

In 1951, Firestone was given the defense contract for the MGM-5 Corporal missile. Firestone was given a total of US$6,888,796 (equivalent to $66.5 million in 2024) for the first 200 units. Known as the "Embryo of the Army", it was a surface-to-surface guided missile which could deliver a high-explosive warhead up to 75 nautical miles (140 km). It was later modified to be able to carry a nuclear payload for use in the event of Cold War hostilities in Eastern Europe. Built in southern California, this missile was replaced in 1962 by the MGM-29 Sergeant system.

In 1961, Firestone acquired the Dayton Tire division from the Dayco Corporation. Dayco later sued both Firestone and Goodyear, alleging that the two companies conspired to monopolize the tire industry in the United States. The United States District Court dismissed the lawsuit. In 1965, Firestone acquired the Seiberling Rubber Company.

Restructuring and sale to Bridgestone

In 1972, Firestone received a ten-year import "concession" by the Kenyan government to secure Firestone's investment in a domestic tire plant, which gave it a virtual monopoly. This included both general price and foreign exchange controls. When the ten-year period came to an end in 1979, Firestone retaliated by increasing production, making entry less attractive. Headquarters eventually canceled expansion and failed negotiations led to no further investments.

In late 1979, Firestone brought in John Nevin, the ex-head of Zenith Electronics, as president to save the hemorrhaging company from total collapse. It was more than a billion dollars in debt at the time and losing $250 million a year (equivalent respectively to $3.48 billion and $869 million in 2024). Nevin closed nine of the company's seventeen manufacturing plants, including six in one day, and relocated the company from its ancestral home in Akron, Ohio to Chicago, Illinois. He spun off non-tire related businesses, including the Firestone Country Club; it was considered a deliberate plan to boost the stock price, and it paid off.

In 1988, after discussions with Pirelli, Nevin negotiated the sale of the company to the Japanese company Bridgestone, which was able to buy the company for much less than it had been worth a decade and a half earlier. The companies celebrated the 20th anniversary of the merger in 2008, and changed the name of the tire division to Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations, LLC.

Bridgestone Americas, which has served as the American branch of Japan-based Bridgestone since 1992, moved their corporate office to downtown Nashville in October 2017. In April 2012, Bridgestone Americas opened up its new Bridgestone Americas Technical Center in Akron. The $100 million facility, located near the former headquarters, tire plant, and technical center, houses 450 employees whose jobs are to develop innovative and advanced tire technologies for the company.

In June 2022, Bridgestone opened up its $21 million Advanced Tire Production Center which replaced the Firestone Advance Tire Works Plant at the original Firestone Tire and Rubber Company headquarters, which opened in 1910. The new building is home of the company's racing tire production for the NTT IndyCar Series. The plant manufactures all Firestone Firehawk racing tires. It is the first new tire plant in the city of Akron in more than 70 years. Bridgestone also opened up a $6 million test track adjacent to the Advanced Tire Production Center to support passenger tire testing and development. The test track opened in autumn 2022. Bridgestone has invested more than $125 million in its Akron operations since 2012, when the company opened the Bridgestone Americas Technology Center.

No matter what the load,

The name that's known is Firestone

Where the rubber meets the road.

Liberian rubber plantation

Firestone established the Firestone Natural Rubber Company plantation in Harbel, Liberia in 1926. From 1926 until the outbreak of the First Liberian Civil War in 1990, the Firestone rubber plantation was the largest plantation of its kind in the world. It was originally envisioned for 350,000 people to be employed on the newly created plantations. However this was more than the number of able-bodied men in the entire nation at the time, which created intense pressure for labor. In the period between 1926 and 1946 Christine Whyte concluded that: The collusion between Firestone and government officials to keep wages low and coerce workers onto the plantations was at best substantially overlooked, at worst regarded as a form of "development" in itself.

In September 1990, rebel National Patriotic Front of Liberia forces (led by Charles Taylor, who would later be convicted of war crimes) executed sitting Liberian president Samuel Doe and seized the Harbel plantation. Firestone had to evacuate its American workers as a result. In June 1991, Firestone sent a delegation to Monrovia in an attempt to restart operations in Harbel. After a month of waiting, the delegation was brought to meet Taylor, and after a further six months of negotiations, the company signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the National Patriotic Reconstruction Assembly Government's Ministry of Finance in January 1992. This MOU provided for taxes to be paid by Firestone to the Taylor government, and for the Taylor government to protect Firestone's employees and assets in Liberia.

Firestone resumed operations in March 1992, but once again had to halt in October that same year as hostilities escalated. Over this period, the company had paid $2.3 million in taxes to the Taylor government (equivalent to $4.6 million in 2024), which some say helped legitimize Taylor's Greater Liberia government and finance and enable its attack on ECOMOG-controlled Monrovia. Operations did not fully restart until 2003 at the conclusion of the Second Liberian Civil War. Since the end of the war, Firestone has invested over $100 million in restoring and rebuilding its facilities in Liberia.

The company's ventures in Liberia have been the subject of considerable scrutiny and criticism, including a 2005 Alien Tort Claims Act case brought in California by the International Labor Rights Fund and a 2014 investigative report by ProPublica entitled "Firestone and the Warlord", and a PBS Frontline documentary by the same name.

Ford Explorer tread separation and rollover problem

In 1996, several state agencies in Arizona began experiencing major issues with Firestone tires on Ford Explorers. According to news reports, various agencies demanded new tires, and Firestone conducted an investigation of the complaints, tested the tires and tried to assert that the tires had been abused or under-inflated.

On September 6, 2000, in a statement before the U.S. Senate Appropriations Transportation subcommittee the president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, Joan Claybrook, stated:

...There are a number of parallels between this recall in 2000 and the 1978 recall of the Firestone 500...there was a documented coverup by Firestone of the 500 defect, spurred by the lack of a Firestone replacement tire. When the coverup was disclosed, the top management of the company was replaced as Firestone was severely damaged in reputation and economically. But a key difference is that the Firestone 500 was used on passenger cars, which rarely rolled over with tire failure. NHTSA documented 41 deaths with the 500, a recall, involving seven million tires.

The report went on to indicate that Ford also had been complicit, stating that The Ford Motor Company had instructed Firestone to add a nylon ply to the tires it manufactured in Venezuela for additional strength and that Ford had made suspension changes to the Explorer model available in Venezuela. Ford did not specify adding the nylon ply for U.S.-made Firestone tires nor did it change the Explorer suspension on U.S. models at this time.

An abnormally high failure rate in Firestone's Wilderness AT, Firestone ATX, and ATX II tires resulted in multiple lawsuits, as well as an eventual mandatory recall. In 2001 Bridgestone/Firestone severed its ties to Ford citing a lack of trust. The lack of trust stemmed from concerns that Ford had not heeded warnings by Bridgestone/Firestone relating to the design of the Ford Explorer. In 2006, Firestone announced renewed efforts to recall tires of the same model recalled in 2000 after the tires were linked to recent deaths and injuries. According to Firestone's last filing with the National Highway Transportation Administration, only 90,259 of more than 2.5 million recalled tires were confirmed as removed from service by 2009. In November 2013, two recalled Wilderness AT tires were found in Atlanta, Georgia. One of the tires was offered for sale as new at a used tire retail shop.

Some outside observers have speculated about the blame worthiness of both parties. Firestone tires being prone to tread separation and failure, and the SUVs being especially prone to rolling over if a tire fails at speed compared to other vehicles. A subsequent NHTSA investigation of real world accident data showed that the Ford Explorer SUVs in question were no more likely to roll over after a tread separation than any other SUV.

Labour economists Alan Krueger and Alexandre Mas concluded that one of the main reasons for the high defect rate of Firestone tires was linked to a dispute between the unions and Firestone at the Decatur plant 1994–1996. They find that the tires manufactured at the plant in question around this time featured substantially increased defect rates, rising with the onset of the dispute and subsiding when the dispute was finally settled at the end of 1996. Other similar plants of Firestone did not report similar increases in the defect rate in this period.