What's inside a Bridgestone radial?

Welcome to this special edition of articles from Real Answers magazine on what goes into the Bridgestone radials we make for you.

We often hear that modern truck tires are the most complicated engineered products ever made. And yet, they have no moving parts – even though the tire itself rotates about 500 times during every mile it travels!

There are dozens of rubber, steel and even fabric components, both synthetic and natural rubber compounds and hundreds of manufacturing steps involved. It’s as finely tuned an art as making a soufflé. Probably more so.

And as we look at all the things that go into your Bridgestone radials, we’ll visit places as diverse as Lake Charles, Louisiana, where petroleum products are turned into synthetic rubber and the West African nation of Liberia, where rubber trees are still tapped for the natural rubber we need.

We hope you’ll find this collection of articles as fascinating to read as they were for us to create. And that they’ll give you a sense of what it takes to make the tires you run on every day – tires that may serve you for hundreds of thousands of miles, then be reborn as retreads to last hundreds of thousands more.

Finally, we want to encourage you to take advantage of an additional resource: We’ve created an informative video that takes you through the whole process of making a truck tire, from raw materials to finished product.

Ask your Bridgestone representative to come by and show it to you – and explain how each thing we do helps create a longer-lasting, lower-cost-per-mile truck tire – for you.