Whitewall tires were once seen as an expensive and difficult-to-maintain sign of prestige, but they’ve all but disappeared from American roads.
In Billy Joel’s chart-topping 1980 song „It’s Still Rock And Roll To Me“, he sings, „What’s the matter with the car I’m driving? Can’t you tell that it’s out of style? Should I get a set of whitewall tires?“ For many, whitewall tires had their heyday in the 1950s, which might lead some to think their origins were part of the same cultural car movement that also gave us fuzzy dice to hang from rearview mirrors and the dancing hula girl to stick on dashboards. The reality is whitewall tires were around much earlier than the 1950s, and their history is not as straightforward as one might think.
Believe it or not,
tires weren’t always black
. In fact, the first ones were an off-white color that had a milky, almost semi-translucent ivory appearance because that’s just how natural untreated rubber looked. However, these early tires didn’t have enough grip, so a white powder called zinc oxide was added, which significantly improved their effectiveness. It also made them bright white.
Credit is usually given to B.F. Goodrich for making the black tire we know today (in 1910) by adding a powdery byproduct known as carbon black (left over when elemental carbon is burned) that not only strengthened the tire but made it turn black. However, Sidney Charles Mote used it at the India Rubber Company in London six years earlier (1904). Even back then, it was a „generally known“ process that was very likely invented and reinvented by many people separately from each other because it was never patented.Whitewalls were a pricey premium product
Tires have changed significantly since their creation, and the addition of carbon black was one of those pivotal changes and a key to B.F. Goodrich’s success. They were one of the first companies to commercialize these new tires, and most new cars that rolled out of the manufacturing plants did so on a set of black tires. Photos from the early years of automobiles show that most have black tires, mainly because white ones didn’t last as long.
And here’s where facts about whitewalls careen off the road into a ditch because there isn’t clear-cut evidence about precisely what happens next. Some sources claim that whitewalls were created as a „cost-cutting measure“ because adding this new carbon black compound also added cost. Or did it? Tom Halter at Curbside Classics did an in-depth deep dive regarding whitewall tires and states that since carbon black is created by simply burning coal (which naturally turns into soot), it was easily made in large amounts at little to no cost at all.
