
To fully meet the demand for tires in the U.S., the country relies on imports, especially from Asian countries. In 2020, the U.S. imported around 34.9 million units of passenger car tires from Thailand and about 13.6 million units from South Korea.
Tire market segments
The most used tires around the world today can be categorized under the pneumatic segment: they operate with air or gas under pressure. Their primary purposes are to provide traction between the vehicle and the road as well as shock absorption for impact.Tires can be further categorized based on the type of vehicle they’re used for and whether they’re used on new vehicles coming from the factory - known as original equipment (OE) - or serving as a replacement for such tires.
Replacement passenger car tires are the leading segment with shipments of over 220,000 units in 2020. In the same year, some 36 million units of OE passenger car tires were shipped in the U.S., a decrease of almost 20 percent compared with 2019. This has likely been caused by a worldwide drop in car production in 2020, triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shortage of chips.