Some thoughts on *Chinese* tires.
Every tire manufacturer I know anything about has a quality department - and they have published standards and procedures. For those who are aware of it, TS16949 was the last international standard being used by the tire industry (I hope I got that number correct!) TS16949 is more about having standards and procedures, and that they are being followed - and not about what those standards are.
The internal standards for any given tire manufacturer typically comply with TS 16949 and there are independent auditors who verify this. I know of no vehicle manufacturers who does not require this audit for supplying tires to them - and many require much more.
There was a time where Cooper wasn't supplying tires to any vehicle manufacturer. I heard through the grapevine that the reason was because of the added expense and hassle of doing these audits. I now see that Cooper is indeed supplying tires to a few vehicle manufacturers, so they must have stepped up and started following TS16949.
But while TS16949 is applicable across the entire corporation, there maybe a few individual plants not included in the certification. However, the system would be in place and it would be a fairly easy matter to get ALL plants up to speed.
And there are good reasons to do so. It's a whole lot easier if the management has only one quality standard to deal with. Plus, each plant competes with all the other plants using these kind of indicators as a guide as to how each is doing (productivity, cost, etc are also indicators.)
So I think any major tire manufacturer can be counted on to have these quality standards in place for pretty much all of their plants, regardless of where the plants are located.
I also think that tire manufacturers who are new to the US market - ala Chinese, Indian, and other Asian based companies - will go through the same process the Japanese and Koreans went through: Their first products didn't do so well, but they improved over time as they learned what was needed to compete with the big boys. As an example, the first Honda's weren't very good, but look at them now.