@DR
The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, founded in Akron, Ohio in 1898, runs its most diversified industrial complex outside the United States in the Luxembourg village of Colmar-Berg.
Goodyear was founded on 29 August 1898 in Akron, Ohio, by Frank Seiberling, who named the firm after Charles Goodyear, the American who had worked out how to vulcanise rubber decades earlier. The company grew with the motor car and stayed in Akron, becoming one of the world’s largest tyre makers, with around 68,000 employees and 57 factories in 23 countries, equipping everything from passenger cars to earthmovers, aircraft and, for many years, Formula One. Luxembourg joined the map in the early 1950s. The Colmar-Berg story began with a tyre plant that has since grown into Goodyear’s largest production site in Europe for truck and earthmover tyres, the core of what the group calls its most diversified complex outside the United States.
Colmar-Berg gathers several operations on a single site. Alongside the tyre plant, a mold plant designs and produces the aluminium and steel molds used by vulcanisation presses in Goodyear factories around the world, while a Regional Calendaring Centre coats fabric cords with rubber and feeds many of the group’s European tyre plants. Part of Goodyear’s European headquarters also sits in the village. Molds and calendared materials made in Luxembourg travel to Goodyear plants on several continents, while the local plant specialises in truck tyres and turns out roughly 1.6 million of them a year. Taken together, these activities make Goodyear one of the largest private employers in the country, with several thousand people at work in a community otherwise better known for its grand-ducal castle than for heavy industry.
Research gives Colmar-Berg its singular weight. The Goodyear Innovation Center Luxembourg opened in 1957 and, together with its counterpart in Akron, drives the group’s research and development throughout the world. It develops tyres for the markets of Europe, Africa and Asia, testing new compounds, tread patterns and materials on its own track and in its laboratories, recent work including ultra-high-performance tyres for both the Goodyear and Dunlop brands. On that in-house track, engineers push prototypes to their limits before any tyre reaches a customer. More than 1,000 engineers, scientists and technicians work there, drawn from over 40 nations. Their reach runs all the way to the top, since even the American President’s car rolls on special Goodyear tyres made by a company that earned around 19 billion dollars in revenue in 2024.
