Are faulty Goodyear lorry tyres from the Marathon LHS2+ series still available to buy new? That is the claim made by Sophie Rollet, the widow of a lorry driver who died in a crash linked to the tyres – and the motivation behind her open letter to Goodyear executives.
Rollet’s husband died in an accident in 2014. Since then, she has been investigating the origins of that crash and other accidents caused by burst lorry tyres. On a Georgian website, she discovered new lorry tyres that appear to belong to the Marathon LHS2+ series – the same series produced in Colmar-Berg that, according to internal Goodyear documents, caused hundreds of accidents of various levels of severity across Europe.
In 2025, Rollet’s efforts led to Goodyear’s indictment in Besançon, where the public prosecutor’s office compiled several fatal accidents. Goodyear faces charges of involuntary homicide, involuntary injury, and commercial deception relating to the quality of its products. An expert assessment determined that the tyres had a production error. However, Goodyear never carried out a safety recall. Instead, the company offered a voluntary commercial exchange programme starting in 2013.
In March, Goodyear told the AFP news agency that as a result of the voluntary programme and based on the life cycle of a tyre, no tyres from the series covered by the programme remained in circulation.
Rollet’s discovery contradicts this assessment. She was able to complete an order of ten new tyres up to the payment process without receiving any error message indicating that the tyres were unavailable. For this reason, she is calling on Goodyear executives to take further measures to ensure that these tyres are out of circulation.
In 2024, the Luxembourg Institute of Standardisation, Accreditation, Safety and Quality of Products and Services (ILNAS) stated that if a safety problem existed due to a production error, Goodyear would have been required to conduct a safety recall.
RTL has enquired with Goodyear about how many tyres were collected through the voluntary programmes and what measures the company is taking to ensure they are no longer in circulation.
