The Company That Never Died

Bridgestone bought Harvey Firestone's company in 1988 and never buried it. The name on the tire and the name on the register have been telling two different stories ever since.

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이 글의 한국어판 → 파이어스톤은 죽지 않았다

This magazine asks six questions of everything on an American shelf. When the answers cluster, there is no article. When they scatter, the gap is the article.

"More than a little bit nervous"

On September 6, 2000, Masatoshi Ono sat before two subcommittees of the House Commerce Committee and opened with an admission no speechwriter would have left in. "I have practiced my speech so that I may deliver it in English," he said. "However, I must use the translator and two of my senior executives to respond to questions. I am 63 years old, and I have never made a public appearance like this before, so I am more than a little bit nervous."

Then came the apology, and the official transcript, Serial No. 106-165, keeps it exactly as he read it: "As Chief Executive Officer, I come before you and apologize to you and the American people, especially for the family they have lost, loved ones, in these terrible rollover accidents."

The sentence does not quite hold together. A smoother version has circulated ever since — "to apologize … especially to the families who have lost loved ones" — and it is not in the record. What is in the record is a man of sixty-three reading a second language aloud to a room that wanted someone to blame, and losing the grammar for half a clause at the moment it mattered most. He went on: "Also, I come to accept full and personal responsibility on behalf of Bridgestone/Firestone for the events that led to this hearing."

Bridgestone/Firestone. The name invites the obvious reading: a Japanese company had bought an Ohio tire maker, and now the Japanese owner was apologizing for the American brand. That reading is natural. On the evidence of Bridgestone's own filings, it is also backwards. The company Ono spoke for was not a Japanese company that had swallowed Firestone. Legally, it was Firestone.

Twenty-two years earlier, the same committee

The hearing knew its own history. Congressman Stupak reminded the witnesses where they were: "Twenty-two years ago, this committee held 4 days of hearings on the first incident of tread belt separation in radial tires. The tire was the Firestone 500 … there were 15 deaths and 16 injuries; ultimately, 41 deaths resulted."

The 1978 story ran on the same rails. A House oversight subcommittee chaired by John E. Moss held hearings in May and July. In October the company agreed in principle to a recall, and the Washington Post quoted its chairman, Richard Riley, explaining why, with a candor few companies would allow today: "We're agreeing to the recall because there has been so much publicity." The Post called it the largest tire recall in history. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, on the page marking its own fiftieth anniversary, puts the count at 14.5 million Firestone 500 steel-belted radials; the Post's figure at the time was 10 million, and other tallies run higher.

Same committee, same company, same failure: the tread separating from the belt. Between the two hearings, the shares had changed hands. That is the thread this piece follows.

Six questions

This magazine asks six questions of everything on an American shelf. Where was it born. Where is it incorporated. Where is the head office. Who owns the shares. Where is it made. Who signs the paycheck. When the answers cluster, there is no article. When they scatter, the gap is the article.

Born: Akron, Ohio, on August 3, 1900. The founder was Harvey S. Firestone (1868–1938); the brand's own history says the first factory "employs 12 men." In 1906 Firestone delivered 2,000 sets of tires to Ford — "the largest single order for tires placed by the auto industry to date," in the company's words — two years before the Model T existed.

Incorporated: Delaware. The Firestone Tire & Rubber Company is now Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company whose authorized member, per Florida's corporate registry, is Bridgestone Americas, Inc., a Nevada corporation that, per Bridgestone's filing, began in the U.S. in December 1994 as Bmah Corporation. That company is owned 100 percent, directly, by Bridgestone Corporation in Tokyo. There is no holding company in between.

Head office: Bridgestone Tower, 200 4th Avenue South, Nashville, thirty stories, opened in 2017, home to more than 1,700 employees and contractors. Above it sits 3-1-1 Kyobashi, Chuo-ku, Tokyo. Firestone's own head office went from Akron to Chicago in 1987, back to Akron in 1989, and to Nashville in 1992.

Shareholders: on the register at December 31, 2025, the largest holder of Bridgestone Corporation is the Master Trust Bank of Japan's trust account, with 15.49 percent; the second is the Ishibashi Foundation, with 12.02 percent, a public-interest foundation whose stated purpose is promoting art, culture and education. (Both percentages are my calculation, dividing by shares outstanding net of treasury stock; against all issued shares the foundation holds 10.75 percent.) No individual named Ishibashi appears in the top ten. The trust-bank accounts hold shares for owners the register does not name.

Made: Bridgestone lists American tire plants in Wilson, North Carolina; Aiken, South Carolina; Warren County, Tennessee; Des Moines, Iowa; and Bloomington, Illinois. Des Moines makes Firestone agricultural tires. An 80,000-square-foot plant in Akron, opened in 2022 with 60 tire builders, makes the Firestone race tires for the IndyCar series. Where Firestone passenger tires are made, plant by plant, I could not establish from primary sources, and I am not going to guess.

Paycheck: Bridgestone counts 115,716 employees across the group at the end of 2025, of whom 46,312, four in ten, work in its Americas segment. It does not publish a figure for the United States alone. The United Steelworkers represent Bridgestone workers in Akron, Des Moines, Bloomington, Russellville in Arkansas, and Warren County. Wilson and Aiken are not on the union's list.

Born in Ohio, registered in Delaware, held from Nevada, run from Nashville, owned from Tokyo. The boxes scatter. But look again at the second one.

What did Bridgestone actually buy?

The usual answer is "Firestone," which is true and tells you almost nothing. A buyer can take a brand and retire the corporation, take a corporation and retire the brand, or take both and fold one into the other. What happened in 1988 is odder than any of those, and it did not begin as a purchase at all.

The stone bridge, turned around

Shojiro Ishibashi founded his company on March 1, 1931, in Kurume, in Fukuoka prefecture. His family name means "stone bridge." By the company's account he wanted an English name so the products would travel abroad. "But, there was one catch: Ishibashi didn't like the sound of 'Stone Bridge,' so he flipped the words to get 'Bridgestone.'"

One coincidence in the two chronologies is worth noticing, and nothing more. In March 1906 a seventeen-year-old Ishibashi took over his family's tailoring business and turned it into a maker of tabi, the split-toed Japanese socks. That was the year Harvey Firestone shipped his 2,000 sets of tires to Ford.

Bridgestone's first foothold in North American manufacturing was a Firestone plant. In the early 1980s it bought a tire factory in LaVergne, Tennessee, outside Nashville, which Firestone had opened in 1972. Bridgestone's American history says so plainly: it "purchased a tire plant in Tennessee from the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company, which became the company's first manufacturing plant in North America." Truck and bus radials came off the line from 1983.

Seventy-five, fifty-eight, eighty

By 1987 Firestone was, in UPI's phrase, "the nation's No. 2 tiremaker," with 53,000 employees, 27,000 of them in Ohio. It was also on its way out of Akron. On April 30, 1987, Firestone announced that its headquarters would move to Chicago. The decision belonged to American management under the chairman, John J. Nevin, a year before Bridgestone bought the company. Firestone had stopped making passenger and truck tires in Akron in 1980, the year after Goodyear and five years after Goodrich. Akron's car tires were gone eight years before the Japanese purchase.

In February 1988 Firestone announced a deal that was not a sale. It would transfer its tire business to a joint venture, "which would give Bridgestone a 75 percent stake and Firestone 25 percent in the joint enterprise," for more than $1 billion in cash, a substantial portion of it to be paid out to Firestone's shareholders.

Then Pirelli arrived. A Pirelli subsidiary called Veere Inc. offered $58 a share for the whole company, a bid UPI valued at $1.9 billion, made as part of an effort "to head off a joint venture" with Bridgestone. On March 7 Nevin wrote to shareholders asking them to wait: "The board of directors encourages you to defer your decision whether to accept or reject Veere's offer until you have had the benefit of and reflected on the board's recommendations."

On March 18 Bridgestone dropped the joint venture and offered $80 a share for everything, about $2.6 billion. (Contemporary and later accounts put the total between $2.6 billion and $2.7 billion.) According to a Businessweek account from 1991, Bridgestone had heard that Pirelli might go as high as $75, and chose a number that ended the conversation. In mid-February the stock had traded under $30. The final price was more than two and a half times that and, by my arithmetic, about 38 percent above Pirelli's bid. Nevin later described the deal as the largest Japanese acquisition of an American manufacturer. It closed in May 1988.

It stayed expensive for years. WardsAuto reported that North American losses ran above a million dollars a day in 1989 and 1990, and that Bridgestone lost more than $1.2 billion over four and a half years, most of it in North America. In January 1990 the company offered buyouts and said a $1.5 billion capital spending plan was being "re-evaluated."

What the register says

Here is the part the phrase "Bridgestone bought Firestone" hides.

Bridgestone's annual securities report for 2025, filed in Tokyo on March 18, 2026, sets out the company's history line by line. Two entries matter. "May 1988 Acquired the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company. (now, Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations, LLC)." And, from six years earlier: "November 1982 Established Bridgestone Tire Manufacturing (U.S.A.), Inc. in the U.S. (May 1990, merged with Bridgestone/Firestone, Inc. (now, Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations, LLC))."

Bridgestone’s annual securities report for 2025 sets out the company’s history line by line. Two entries matter. In May 1990 Bridgestone’s own American manufacturing subsidiary was merged into the acquired company.

Read those parentheses together. In 1989 the acquired company took the name Bridgestone/Firestone. In May 1990 Bridgestone's own American manufacturing subsidiary was merged into it. The Japanese company's American factory went inside Harvey Firestone's corporation, not the other way round. In December 2001 that corporation was split up by business line under a holding company, and today it is called Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations. The Firestone website's copyright line says so: © 2026 Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations, LLC.

So when Ono said "Bridgestone/Firestone" in September 2000, he was speaking for the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company under its second name. The corporation that apologized in 2000 was the corporation whose tire the same committee had investigated in 1978.

The same filing shows how much that corporation matters now. The report breaks out, one by one, subsidiaries whose revenue exceeds ten percent of the group's, and two American companies are among them. The retail arm, Bridgestone Retail Operations, reported ¥764.0 billion in 2025. Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations reported ¥1,169.5 billion. Against group revenue of ¥4,429.5 billion, that is about 26 percent, my calculation from the company's figures. Roughly one yen in four that Bridgestone takes in passes through the company Harvey Firestone founded.

Bridgestone has its own phrase for 1988. The same report calls the Firestone acquisition "our 'second foundation (Bridgestone 2.0).'" Keep that word, foundation. It comes back.

The first profitable year

The corporation's American workers learned what the new ownership meant in 1994.

The union contract expired on April 1, 1994. According to the Princeton economists Alan Krueger and Alexandre Mas, the company demanded that workers move from eight-hour to twelve-hour shifts rotating between days and nights, that plants run seven days a week, that new hires be paid 30 percent less, that hourly workers contribute to health-care costs, and that senior workers lose two weeks of vacation. The request, they note, "came at a time of falling national unemployment and just after B/FS's first profitable year since being acquired by Bridgestone."

On July 12, 1994, locals of the United Rubber Workers representing 4,200 workers went on strike, at plants in Des Moines, Decatur and Oklahoma City, the Akron research center and an air-spring plant in Noblesville. By January 1995 the company had hired 2,300 replacement workers and made them permanent. The URW, bankrupt, voted that July to merge into the United Steelworkers. On January 13, 1995, President Clinton said that "the management of Bridgestone-Firestone is flagrantly turning its back on our tradition of peaceful collective bargaining to solve labor disputes," and in March he signed Executive Order 12954, restricting federal contracts with companies that permanently replaced strikers. Business groups sued. Bridgestone/Firestone, Inc. was among the plaintiffs, and in February 1996 the federal appeals court in Washington held that the order conflicted with the National Labor Relations Act. The strike ended with a settlement ratified in December 1996.

Krueger and Mas then broke tire-failure data down by plant and by year of production. Tires built at Decatur during the dispute, they found, were "at least 15 times more likely to have resulted in a claim" four years after production than tires from other plants; in one of their models, claims ran 339 percent higher, other things held constant. Their monthly data suggest the worst months clustered around the wage-concession demands of early 1994 and the period in late 1995 and early 1996 when replacement workers and returning strikers worked side by side.

That is a correlation of time and place. It is not proof that the strike killed anyone, and the federal investigation that followed also weighed the tire's design, the Ford specification and the inflation pressure. But Decatur is the name that matters for what came next.

Fourteen point four million, or six point five

On August 9, 2000, Firestone announced a recall. The government's engineering report, published in October 2001, gives the size: "approximately 14.4 million P235/75R15 Radial ATX, ATX II, and Wilderness AT tires." Every ATX of that size was included, whichever plant made it; the Wilderness AT part was limited to tires built at Decatur, Illinois.

The death toll moved every few weeks, which is why it has to carry a date each time.

The number Americans heard was smaller. In his written statement to Congress, Ono said the company had "voluntarily recalled an estimated 6.5 million tires." That was not a different recall. It was Firestone's estimate of how many of the 14.4 million were still in service in the United States when the recall began, "less than half," as the NHTSA report puts it. Both numbers are true. One counts what was recalled. The other counts what was still rolling. The company led with the second.

The death toll moved every few weeks, which is why it has to carry a date each time. When NHTSA opened its preliminary inquiry on May 2, 2000, it had four fatalities on file. By August 31 the count was 88. On September 21, at the second day of the House hearing, Bailey, testifying for NHTSA, said: "it is now 101 fatalities." By the fall of 2001 the agency's count, as reported by UPI and cited by Krueger and Mas, stood at 271 deaths and more than 800 injuries linked to Firestone tire failures, 192 of the deaths from tread separations.

Some of the warning had come from abroad. On September 6 one member of the committee put it this way: "With less than 6,000 vehicles in the entire country of Saudi Arabia, there were 18 accidents in Saudi Arabia, including 7 fatalities in 1999."

Congress moved within two months of that first hearing day. The TREAD Act, signed November 1, 2000, required manufacturers to report foreign recalls, and its Section 13 told the Secretary of Transportation to write a rule requiring "a warning system in new motor vehicles to indicate to the operator when a tire is significantly under inflated." The tire-pressure warning light on a new car's dashboard descends from that sentence.

At the hearings the two companies turned on each other. Jacques Nasser, Ford's chief executive: "Ford did not know--I will repeat that--Ford did not know that there was a defect with the recalled tires until we virtually pried the data from Firestone's hands and analyzed it ourselves." And: "So we know that this is a Firestone tire issue, not a vehicle issue." On September 21 John Lampe, then a Firestone vice president, answered for his side: "We must and we do take full responsibility for these problems," and, in the same testimony, "we now know that at 26 psi, there is a very low safety margin for the Explorer as compared to some other SUVs."

He said one more thing that bears on everything above. The recall, Lampe told the committee, "has impacted our company and our 35,000 employees like no other event in our 100-year history."

A hundred years. Twelve years after the Japanese purchase, the company's own witness counted its age from Akron in 1900.

Via fax

By May 2001 Lampe was chairman, chief executive and president of Bridgestone/Firestone, and on May 21 he sent Nasser a letter from 50 Century Boulevard, Nashville, marked "Via Fax."

"Today, I am informing you that Bridgestone/Firestone, Inc. is ending its tire supply relationship with the Ford Motor Company. … Business relationships, like personal ones, are built upon trust and mutual respect. We have come to the conclusion that we can no longer supply tires to Ford since the basic foundation of our relationship has been seriously eroded. This is not a decision we make lightly after almost 100 years of history." He added: "We believe you are attempting to divert scrutiny of your vehicle by casting doubt on the quality of Firestone tires."

Two limits on the letter. It covered new supply agreements "in the Americas," not the world, and it promised to honor existing contracts. And "almost 100 years" is generous. Counted from the 1906 order, it was ninety-five.

The next day Ford said it would replace up to 13 million Wilderness AT tires on its vehicles, at an after-tax charge of $2.1 billion. In June, Firestone said it would close Decatur, described by UPI as "the plant that made most of the 6.5 million tires recalled last August," where 1,380 people worked. Settlements followed: $51.5 million from Firestone to the states in November 2001, a separate $51.5 million from Ford to the states in December 2002, and $240 million from Firestone to Ford in 2005.

The families were harder to separate than the companies. On June 21, 1947, Harvey Firestone's granddaughter Martha Parke Firestone married Henry Ford's youngest grandson, William Clay Ford; the reception was held at Harbel Manor, the Firestone house in Akron. Their son, William Clay Ford Jr., was described in 2024 as executive chair of the Ford Motor Company. He is a great-grandson of both founders. The fax ended a supply relationship. It could not end that one.

The strongest case that this is a technicality

It bears saying that "Firestone never died" can be read as a lawyer's trick, and the case against it is a good one.

A corporation is a legal container. What makes a company a company is its people, its places and its decisions, and by each of those measures the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company of 1900 is gone. The head office is in Nashville. The final decisions are made in Tokyo. The Akron passenger and truck tire lines stopped in 1980. Of the three production plants that struck in 1994, Decatur closed in 2001 and Oklahoma City in 2006; only Des Moines remains, and it has been through several rounds of layoffs since 2024. The LaVergne plant, the Firestone factory that became Bridgestone's first in North America, stopped production on July 2, 2025, and closed at the end of that month. On this reading, which corporate shell survived a merger is housekeeping, and building a story on it is sentiment.

The case cuts the other way too. The favorite American version of this story, in which a Japanese company buys an Ohio icon and hollows out Akron, does not fit the dates either. Firestone stopped making car tires in Akron in 1980 and moved its head office to Chicago in 1987, under American management. It was Bridgestone that moved the headquarters back to Akron in 1989, before taking it to Nashville.

I think most of that is right. But a corporation is not only a container. It is the thing that carries liability, and it carries memory. It was Bridgestone/Firestone, Inc. that recalled the tires, sat before Congress, closed Decatur and paid the states: a company answering, in law, for tires Firestone made. And the people running it did not treat 1988 as a clean break. Lampe spoke of "our 100-year history." His letter invoked "almost 100 years." Tokyo calls the purchase its "second foundation." Nobody inside the company behaves as if Harvey Firestone's corporation ended in 1988. They behave as if it was inherited.

Where the name lives now

If you want to find the Firestone name in America today, a tire may not be the likeliest place.

Firestone Complete Auto Care, marking a hundred years of service in June 2026, counts more than 1,800 stores in 48 states and more than 9,500 technicians. The stores are company-owned, not franchised, part of Bridgestone Retail Operations, which runs more than 2,200 service centers in all and even includes a bank, Credit First National Association, the issuer of the Firestone credit card. That may be the Firestone most drivers actually walk into.

The name turns up elsewhere in the filing. Firestone Polymers makes synthetic rubber; Firestone Industrial Products makes air springs. In Liberia, Firestone Natural Rubber runs, by its own figures, 118,990 acres of plantation with more than 4,000 employees, 99.7 percent of them Liberian, under a relationship with the government that began in 1926. And one Firestone is no longer Bridgestone's at all: the roofing business, Firestone Building Products, was sold to Holcim for $3.4 billion in April 2021. Same name, another owner.

Foundation

Go back to the room in September 2000.

A sixty-three-year-old executive read an apology in a language he had practiced for the occasion, on behalf of a company that was founded in Akron on August 3, 1900, had its tire before the same committee in 1978, and had been owned since 1988 by a firm whose name was a Japanese surname turned around. He was not apologizing for somebody else's company. By every document on file, he was running it.

Eight months later its chairman wrote the letter that ended the supply relationship with Ford, and in it he reached for the word Bridgestone's filings now use for 1988: "We have come to the conclusion that we can no longer supply tires to Ford since the basic foundation of our relationship has been seriously eroded."

Tokyo calls 1988 a second foundation. The first was laid in Akron in 1900, and the register still carries it.

Ono told the committee he had never made a public appearance like that before. The company he spoke for had.