Michelin

Michelin is a company producing, distributing, and selling tires. It provides tires and services for different kinds of vehicles, like airplanes, automobiles, bicycles and motorcycles, earthmovers, farm equipment, and trucks. The company also offers digital mobility support services and publishes travel guides, hotel and restaurant guides, maps, and road atlases. Headquartered in Clermont-Ferrand, France, Michelin has presence in about 170 countries and operates sixty-seven production plants in seventeen various countries. The company has a technology center in charge of research and development, with operations in Europe, North America, and Asia.

Established in 1889 by the Michelin brothers, André and Édouard, the company produced tires for bicycles and horse-drawn carriages before venturing into pneumatic tires for automobiles in the 1890s. To portray that demountable pneumatic tires could be used on motor vehicles, the brothers equipped a car with such tires fastened onto the rims by bolts, entered the vehicle, and drove it in the 1895 Paris–Bordeaux road race. They did not win the race; still, they created interest in pneumatic tires.

The Michelin company became a main manufacturer of tires in Europe. In 1948, the company introduced steel-belted radial tires. It established a foreign plant at Turin, Italy, in 1906 and operates facilities in different countries. Reorganized as a holding company in 1951, Michelin had interests in tires, other rubber products, as well as synthetic rubber. The company also publishes an international series of travel guides referred to as Michelin guides and a series of road maps. The guides were introduced by André Michelin, whose objective was to promote tourism by car and support his tire industry in that vein.