Sitting down to a meal to find your restaurant boasting Michelin stars on its menu makes you wonder why a rubber company started a side business as a food critic. As it turns out, the aim was to sell tires. The Michelin brothers, starting in 1900, thought that if they gave away a hotel and restaurant guide, affluent French owners of automobiles would drive everywhere to eat amazing food and, in the process, need to buy more tires. And, long before the internet, people would have to stop by a shop selling Michelins to get the latest guide.
Not a bad strategy. The Michelin guide has turned into the definitive tour book for foodies, and Michelin?s tire business is doing okay, too. Aside from winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans for the 19th year in a row in 2016 and being the spec-tire supplier for Formula E and MotoGP, the bubbly-mascot brand also decided to launch a new line of ultra-high-performance tires, a business sector in which, we think, it already had the market cornered with the Pilot Super Sport (PSS). When the PSS launched in 2010, it bucked the naming trend previously set by the Pilot Sport and Pilot Sport PS2. There was also a Pilot Sport 3, a tire Americans would only see as original equipment on some cars, with the PSS destined to fulfill the needs of the replacement-tire market. Later, the PSS became the original-equipment fitment on many high-performance cars, too. In fact, we found in one comparison test of the BMW M3, Cadillac ATS-V, and Mercedes-AMG C63 SÂ...