Goodyear has been innovative yet lacking in real world results.
Goodyear has been very innovative in their tire design. They were the first to field a very successful uni-directional high performance tire for sports cars, the original Gatorbacks. Those came out in the lat 1980-veyr early 1990 and now everyone makes uni-directional hig hspeed tires.
They then came out with the Aquatred with two large cirumferential grooves to evacuate water in rain soaked roads. While this appeared to be a sound idea, no one else copied it, and it's really relegated to Big O's A/T line. But tires with significant circumferential grooves are on the market.
In SUV tires, they came out with the GSA--their first try at triple tread design. The outer 1/3 was a close gap pattern for corerning while the middle section is a hybrid. THe inside 1/3 had larger blocks for more off road design. Unfortunatley, it did not live up to its promise and dissappointed many buyers. See tirerack.com's reviews.
Goodyear's original A/T was a bomb--no one really liked it. Their RT/S line was cheaply made and went through 3 difdferent tread designs--I was very dissappointed at their OEM on my Tahoe.
Their MT's took a back seat to BFG/s MT and quality was not seen in too many of their models.
However, their MTR seemed to be impressing the off road crowd and their Silent Armor seems to be ok. tirerack.com reviews were mainly positive with teh most common complaint to be gas mileage loss.
While I think Goodyear may be getting better, I'd still would wait until there are a couple of million miles of real world usage before I would try it.
