Nobody thinks about tyres, and that's the problem
By Mike Coppen-Gardner
A new report from Oxford Economics, commissioned by Tyres Europe, sets out in careful detail what the European tyre industry is worth to the continent it moves.
Tyres enable freight, farming and passenger transport, sectors said to generate 1.5 trillion euros in GDP and employ 30.5 million people, roughly one in eight European workers. Forty per cent of the tyres fitted in Europe last year were imported, up from a much smaller share only a decade ago. The industry depends entirely on imported natural rubber, sourced from a small handful of countries with a habit of flooding or catching disease at inconvenient moments.
These are striking figures, and they were compiled for a reason. Tyres are rarely part of any conversation about European industrial strategy, and Tyres Europe's Secretary General Adam McCarthy is using this study to argue for one, describing tyres as technology-intensive products that play a critical role in vehicle and people safety.
The argument is sound and the fact that it needed to be made at all, in 2026, about a product every household relies on, is the more interesting story.
But ask most people to name an industry that keeps Europe running and tyres will not come up. Ambulances, fire engines and farm tractors depend on them completely, yet the product itself is treated as an afterthought, something replaced every few years without a second thought about where it came from or what would happen if it stopped arriving.
This is not a failure of the tyre industry's engineering: manufacturers have spent a decade improving safety, rolling resistance and circularity, largely without anyone outside the sector noticing. It is a failure of narrative, and one shared by almost every industry that makes something essential rather than something exciting.
The Belief Gap
Call it the belief gap: the distance between what an industry actually does and what the public and policymakers believe it does. Pharmaceuticals, agricultural inputs, energy grids and, yes, tyres all suffer a version of the same problem. Their value is inherent rather than visible, so the case only gets made when a commissioned report forces the issue onto an agenda that would otherwise ignore it.
This approach has a shelf life. A single well-timed study can secure a good news day and a handful of supportive quotes. It cannot, on its own, close a belief gap built up over decades of silence.
The same report models what happens when the industry's underlying vulnerability is tested rather than described: a sustained shortage of natural rubber, and EU GDP falls by an estimated 250 billion euros over three years, unemployment rises by 400,000, and the average household loses 230 euros in real purchasing power. Those are the numbers that matter to a policymaker. They are also the numbers that vanish from public attention within a fortnight of this week's launch, once the report cycle ends and public perception reverts to something closer to a commodity than a critical strategic asset.
The EU Deforestation Regulation, which the European Council confirmed in December will begin applying to large and medium operators from 30 December 2026 and to smaller ones six months after, requires full traceability of natural rubber to a specific plot of land. It will not wait for public opinion to catch up. Neither will the next natural rubber shock, whenever it arrives.
The more durable answer is to treat public belief as something an industry builds continuously, not something corrected in a single press cycle.
It means measuring the gap between belief and reality with the same rigour Oxford Economics applied to GDP and employment, so that progress can be tracked rather than assumed. And it means being present in the argument before a regulation or a supply shock forces the issue, rather than after.
None of this diminishes what Tyres Europe has done. The report is a serious, rigorous piece of work, and the industrial strategy case it makes deserves to be pushed as hard and as far as it can go. But a report is a moment, and belief is built over years.
This is not a reason for caution. It is a reason to keep going, to take a genuinely strong story and keep telling it long after this week's headlines move on, until the case Tyres Europe has made is not simply published but believed.
The industries that do well over the next decade will not be the ones with the best statistics alone. They will be the ones that did exactly that.
Mike Coppen-Gardner is the founder and CEO of SPQR, a digital-first strategic comms agency
