Michelin is one of the oldest and most successful tire brands of all time, which means it has seen it all in terms of tire development –- and a whole lot more.
Formed in 1889 by Edouard and André Michelin, the company predates most automakers and is widely known for much more than just its tires. The Michelin Guide to restaurants was first published in 1900 to encourage drivers to use their cars more in seeking great places to eat and its seal of approval remains a gold standard in the restaurant industry. Michelin's maps were also used on D-Day to good effect, and Michelin's iconic Bibendum mascot – otherwise known as the Michelin Man – has been around since 1898.
Odds are that you know Michelin makes well-regarded car tires, and you might also be aware that it's products not restricted to autos. However, did you know it patented the first radial tire way back in 1946? Or that it opened its first American factory in 1907? It even owned a majority stake in the Citroen car company for 40 years from 1935, and the head of the Michelin company at the time was instrumental in the creation of the Citroen 2CV.
Given how ubiquitous the Michelin name is throughout the history of tire making, we shouldn't be surprised to learn that the French company has taken over its fair share of other tire brands, too. Here they all are, sorted in order of how likely it is you will have already heard of them.
Interim Archives/Getty Images
Like many car tire manufacturers, BFGoodrich –- named for its founder, Benjamin Franklin Goodrich — made pneumatic tires for bicycles in its early days. However, it can also claim to be the first company in the U.S. to make them for an automobile in 1896, one of many firsts for the brand.
Those early tires were fitted to vehicles made by the Winton Motor Carriage Company. In 1903, Horatio Jackson and Sewall Crocker made history by driving one of those early cars — fitted with BFGoodrich tires — from San Francisco to New York City in what is believed to be the first road trip of its kind, raising the public profile of the car as a concept.
In 1970, BFGoodrich pulled off another publicity stunt to prove the worth of the world's first 60-series radial tire for use on powerful muscle cars. The so-called Tirebird was created to prove that the new road tire was good enough to win on track, which it promptly did at the Watkins Glen International.
Fast forward another decade and the first-ever NASA space shuttle gets ready to take flight wearing specially developed BFGoodrich tires. Just five years later, the company merged with Uniroyal and finally, in 1990 — the same year as the space shuttle's 35th mission — Michelin bought the company to secure its position as a big player in North America. Today, BFGoodrich focuses on high-performance tires, for road, track, and off the beaten track.
Matthew G Eddy/Shutterstock
Given Uniroyal tires' reputation for strong performance in the rain, it is apt that the company started out –- in 1868 –- making a variety of water-resistant products from rubber.
Such was the obsession of Oscar Englebert, a Belgian. His son came up with the idea of a zig-zag pattern in 1914 to aid grip, which led to massive success for Englebert Tyres, as it was known at the time. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the United States Rubber Company was formed in 1892 by the merger of nine rubber companies. The two entities came together and the Uniroyal brand was coined in 1961, borrowing a name from the United States Rubber Company sub-brand U.S. Royal.
One of the firm's most famous sub-brands, Tiger Paws, was born around the same time, and it became synonymous with the Pontiac GTO of the early 1960s. The company was –- quite literally -– riding high, and to let others experience the feeling it produced the iconic giant tire for the 1964-1965 World's Fair in New York, as a Ferris wheel. It was then shipped to Detroit and has remained there ever since, albeit with several modernizations.
The fortunes of U.S. tire companies waned through the late 1970s and into the 1980s, blamed on the challenge from imports and the impact of longer-lasting radial tires reducing sales. This led to the take over of European Uniroyal operations by Continental and the eventual merger of BFGoodrich and Uniroyal, the result of which was subsequently bought by Michelin.
Rainer Herhaus/Shutterstock
It seems that, like the sand its off-road tires excel on, BFGoodrich gets everywhere. You see, Kléber, yet another sub-brand owned by Michelin, started life in 1910 as the Société Française B.F. Goodrich in Colombes, a city in the Paris suburbs. Unless our French is worse than we thought, that name basically means B.F. Goodrich France. Its first tire was made at the end of 1911, and it was renamed Colombes-Goodrich in 1938 after a little government investment.
Following World War II, during which time the original factory was bombed, the company moved about five miles south and across the river to Avenue Kléber, sparking yet another new name –- Kléber-Colombes. Then a key moment in Kléber's history happened in 1948 with the launch of its first agricultural tire and just three years later it brought out a version with an integrated inner tube. By 1970 it was a leader in Europe for agricultural tires.
However, our interest was more piqued by the fact Kléber (its name since 1968) was chosen as the sole tire supplier to Concorde in 1969. It was replaced before the supersonic airliner started commercial flights in 1976, however, which was probably no bad thing given what happened.
Kléber likes to associate itself with Michèle Mouton – the most successful woman to have competed in the WRC – as her Audi Quattro rally cars of 1981 and 1982 wore Kléber tires. Michelin bought Kléber in 1981 during a period of financial difficulty.
Tricky_Shark/Shutterstock
A surefire way to increase market share in any country is to buy out the biggest player, which is just what Michelin did in 1995 when it bought the largest tire company in Poland — Stomil Olsztyn. In case you are wondering why Poland was seen as so important, its population is comparable to that of Canada, at about 38 million.
You could speculate that the location of the Olsztyn factory, itself in operation since 1935 -– producing tires since 1959 -– was also seen as favorable. Positioned in northern Poland, it is close to the coast, along with the borders of Lithuania and Belarus. Indeed, when the Polish outpost was rebranded Michelin Polska in 2005, it oversaw all of Michelin's operations in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. In fact, Olsztyn was Michelin's largest factory at one time, and certainly the largest tire factory in Poland.
"What has all this got to do with the Kormoran brand?" You ask. Well, Kormoran –- Polish for cormorant — first appeared on tires from the Olsztyn factory in 1994 and it is still going strong today. Poland has some of the largest populations of cormorants in Europe, not all that far from the tire company's base, so that likely influenced the creation of the brand.
JoshBryan/Shutterstock
Some of the Michelin-owned brands listed here are not available on the North American market, but Riken is. The company started in Japan in 1917 as a research institution that investigated non-living things such as energy and force, along with the chemistry of substances. Its full name was Riken Gomu Industry and the scientific side of the business is still in operation today in Japan as a large research organization backed by the Japanese government. Sadly, that arm of the business has nothing to do with tires anymore.
Riken tires, meanwhile, did not exist until 1956. The Nippon Riken Rubber Co was formed, then merged with the Okamoto Rubber Co. in 1966 to become the Okamoto Riken Rubber Co. Forgive us a bit of a diversion here, as Okamoto's expertise was "rubbers" of a different kind – i.e. condoms. The story of how it promoted its wares through a unique motorsport logo as shared by Japanese Nostalgic Car is well worth reading, even if it does not have a lot to do with Riken tires.
Michelin came into the picture in 1989, creating the Michelin Okamoto Tire Corporation and allowing Michelin to become the first European tire company to manufacture its products in Japan. The link with Okamoto was severed — though we think they missed a marketing trick by not using the Michelin Man to promote condoms — while Michelin acquired the rights to the Riken tires brand.
You can no longer buy a new Taurus in North America –- you'd have to travel to the Middle East if you want one those Ford sedans –- but you could order yourself a set of Taurus tires online. Though not for a Taurus, if you get my drift, as the tire company of that name specializes in agricultural products these days. Which some might say would be perfectly in line with how that other Taurus handles.
Moving swiftly on, the Taurus tire brand has its origins in Hungary as far back as 1882, sold as Cordatic tires in 1912 before settling on the same Taurus name and logo as is still in use today just a year after. The company was nationalized in 1949 after World War II but did not start manufacturing agricultural tires until three decades later. Taurus Agrotyre was created in 1992 to focus on this part of the business before merging into the Michelin empire in 1996.
A century after the Taurus brand was launched, it began making passenger car tires once more in 2013. Sadly, they are not the tires you will find from the company in the States today.
A glimpse into the massive world of tire manufacturing is provided by Cimcorp, a supplier chosen by Tigar Tyres to design and install automated production processes at its plant in Pirot in Serbia. The video showing robotic movement and creation of all the tires is mesmerizing and it might make you wonder why you have never heard of Tigar before. Nevertheless, the Serbian factory, as part of the sprawling Michelin domain, produces tires for many sibling brands, including Kormoran, Riken, Orium, Strial and Taurus -– not to mention Tigar itself.
Technically speaking, Orium and Strial are two further tire brands that Michelin own, but best to think of them as sub-brands of Tigar itself. All three share the same vague histories on their public-facing websites, where the factory in Serbia was opened in 1935 to make rubber products before starting tire production in 1959. BFGoodrich enters the equation in the 1970s and Michelin became involved in 1997 before taking total ownership in 2007.
Herry cai neng/Shutterstock
You know the score by now — Michelin wants to expand into a region or market sector it hitherto has not been highly active in and takes a shortcut by buying out an established player. So it was in Indonesia when the French company acquired ownership of both the Corsa and Achilles tire companies, both strong brands in large parts of Asia and Australia. They came under the umbrella of "PT Multistrada Arah Sarana Tbk" (PT and Tbk are Indonesian legalese equivalent to inc. in the States), a public company that Michelin first invested in 2019 and eventually took fully private in 2025.
Look for Corsa Tires in the U.S. and you will find a different company -– one founded in 1957 by John Corsa and specializing in high-performance tires –- but that is not to be confused with the Michelin-owned entity that still manufactures tires in Indonesia, which exclusively makes motorbike tires. Achilles tires are for four-wheeled vehicles, especially those going off road, though it does make a few road-biased tires, too.
Michelin makes tires for all kinds of vehicles aside from regular cars, so we should not be surprised to learn it owns other brands that do the same. One that we expect few readers of Jalopnik to have heard of is Camso. That name has been around since 2015, specializing in off-road industries — referring to industries not on the public road, as opposed to going off-road in your lifted Bronco. Think wheels and tires for forklifts, construction vehicles, and tracks too.
In fact, one half of the origin story comes from Camoplast, a Canadian firm that started development work in 1982 on snowmobile tracks. Two years later, in Sri Lanka, Solideal started using local raw materials to make solid tires for use on forklifts. They joined forces and operate as one big happy family called Camso today, focusing on agriculture, construction, material handling, and powersports. So unless you plan on fitting snowmobile tracks or solid tires to your Miata, you are not likely to come across the Camso brand at all.
In fact, that name will not be part of the Michelin family for much longer. It only took it over in 2018 –- for a massive $1.45 billion –- yet made a deal with CEAT Specialty Tires in late 2024 to sell the brand. Look closer and you will discover it is not getting out of the business completely, just divesting itself of a couple of the Sri Lankan factories and the Camso name after a licensing period.
