Commercial medium truck tires are back in the news again, as two manufacturers, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. and Bridgestone Americas Inc., recently announced big changes within their TBR tire production footprints.
Last month, MTD learned that Goodyear is planning to move the majority of TBR tire production at its Danville, Va., plant to other facilities.
In a statement provided to MTD, a Goodyear spokesperson said the Akron, Ohio-based company “plans to refocus the Danville, Va., facility on mixing and the aviation sector.” (Goodyear has built aircraft tires at the facility for many years.)
The Danville facility, which opened in 1966, is one of two commercial medium truck tire plants within Goodyear’s North American manufacturing network.
According to MTD’s recently published 2025 Facts Issue, the Danville plant can build up to 11,000 medium truck tires per day.
Goodyear’s other North American TBR tire production plant — a factory in Topeka, Kan., that also builds OTR tires — has the capacity to manufacture 5,500 units per day.
Goodyear has not revealed which of the company's factories will pick up Danville’s TBR tire production.
More recently, Bridgestone Americas Inc. announced plans to close its TBR tire plant in LaVerge, Tenn., in July.
The decision to shutter the factory “is part of the company’s strategic initiatives to optimize its business footprint, strengthen its competitiveness and enhance the quality of the company’s U.S. operations,” said Bridgestone officials.
According to MTD’s 2025 Facts Issue, Bridgestone’s LaVergne plant, which opened in 1972, has the capacity to build 3,100 TBR tires per day.
Like Goodyear, Bridgestone has two TBR tire plants in the U.S. The other, Bridgestone’s plant in Warren County, Tenn., can produce 9,400 TBR tires per day at full throttle, according to MTD research.
The Warren County plant, which opened in 1990, is undergoing a $550 million capital infusion that will allow it to build TBR tires equipped with radio frequency tags.
When asked what will happen to the LaVergne plant's capacity, Bridgestone officials told MTD that it “will be shared among several existing plants,” but did not offer specifics.
Between the Danville plant and the LaVergne plant, a total of 14,100 TBR tires per day may have to find another home.
What does this say about projections for TBR tire demand? Is a downturn imminent?
At last month’s K&M Tire Inc. conference in Columbus, Ohio, Emily Clayton, senior economic analyst for the American Trucking Associations, provided an overview of the challenges facing the U.S. truck market.
“We’re seeing less production of heavy-duty trucks,” she told attendees. “We’re seeing an over-supply in the industry. We’re seeing a leveling-out (of fleet revenue) at a rate that’s much lower than what we’d like to see.”
Some trucking fleets “are in a really tough spot,” which could lead to continued capacity reduction, according to Clayton.
On the surface, that sounds ominous. But the trucking industry is cyclical. Rebounds inevitably happen, which is one reason why I believe other tire manufacturers are bullish on the U.S. TBR tire market’s prospects.
Hankook Tire North America, for instance, is in the process of adding TBR tire production capabilities at its plant in Clarksville, Tenn., as part of a $1.6 billion investment.
The U.S. market also is experiencing a big influx of what some would call “tier-three” and even “tier-four” truck tire brands, causing a boom in imports.
Tiremakers in Thailand, for example, shipped slightly more than seven million medium truck tires to the U.S. in 2024.
Nearly three million TBR tires built in Vietnamese plants were shipped to the U.S. last year, making Vietnam the second largest exporter of medium truck tires to America.
The top five TBR tire exporters to the U.S. during 2024 were rounded out by Japan, which shipped 1.6 million units; Canada, which shipped 1.5 million units; and Cambodia, which shipped one million units.
MTD's 2025 Facts Issue also provides data on shipments from other countries.
It goes without saying that if off-shore manufacturers didn’t see long-term opportunities here, the above numbers would be much smaller.
Despite the imposition of tariffs by the Trump administration and current softness in the truck market, I see a bright future for TBR tire importers and domestic truck tire manufacturers.
In the meantime, it will be interesting to see where those Goodyear and Bridgestone units land.
