The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company has elected Joe Hinrichs as chairman of its board of directors, the tyre maker announced on 9 October 2026. The appointment took effect two days before it was made public, on the seventh of that month.
Hinrichs also takes the chair of two of the board's standing committees, governance and executive, which places him at the centre of both succession planning and the board's authority to act between scheduled meetings. He has served as a Goodyear director since 2023.
He succeeds Laurette Koellner in the chair. Koellner remains on the board and is expected to retire at the company's 2027 annual meeting, an arrangement that gives the transition a defined runway rather than an abrupt handover.
A career built in automotive and rail
Hinrichs comes to the role from the railways. His most recent executive position was president and chief executive of CSX Corporation, the eastern United States freight operator, a post he left before taking the Goodyear chair. Before that he spent much of his career at Ford Motor Company, where he was president of the automotive business and earlier held the top jobs in two of the carmaker's largest overseas units, serving as chairman and chief executive of its China operation and as president and chief executive in Canada.
That combination is unusual for a tyre company chairman. Goodyear sells into the automotive supply chain and moves a great deal of rubber, carbon black and finished product by rail, so a chairman who has run both a vehicle manufacturer and a Class I railroad arrives with direct experience of the company's customers and of its freight costs.
A non-executive chair, not a change at the top
The appointment does not change Goodyear's executive leadership. Mark W. Stewart continues as chief executive officer, and the chairmanship Hinrichs takes is a non-executive one. The separation of the two roles is the governance structure Goodyear has maintained, and this election keeps it intact rather than consolidating power in a single office.
Hinrichs joined the board in 2023 as part of a slate agreed with the activist investor Elliott Investment Management, alongside Max H. Mitchell and Roger J. Wood. Three years on, the elevation of one of those directors to the chair is a measure of how far the board has been reshaped since that agreement, and of how settled the arrangement has become.
For a company working through a multi-year cost and portfolio programme, the practical significance is continuity of oversight rather than a change of direction. Hinrichs has sat through the period in which that programme was designed, so he inherits the governance of a strategy he helped approve rather than one he must first learn.
