World's Largest Tire, before its 1998 refurbishing.

World's Largest Tire

Allen Park, Michigan

The Statue of Liberty has its fans, but perhaps a more fitting giant symbol of America stands beside I-94, near the Detroit Metro Airport. It is the World's Largest Tire and it is an automobile tire, thank you, not a tire to some fruit-loopey pivoting windmill or solar cell.

This 12-ton, 80-foot-tall behemoth was built to withstand hurricane-force winds, and served as a ferris wheel (and a huge advertisement for Uniroyal) at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. Twenty-four gondolas circled the tire where the treads are today, carrying nearly two million people. The tire was moved to Allen Park in 1966 and, although urban legends tell of it breaking loose and rolling across I-94, there's no evidence that this has ever happened.

In 1998 Uniroyal stabbed the tire with a 11-foot-long, 250-pound nail -- another "world's largest" -- to promote their puncture-resistant Tiger Paw Nailgard tire. The big tire withstood the assault and the nail was eventually removed and given to Allen Park, which then put it up for sale on eBay in 2003 to raise money for a local historical society. The city hoped that someone would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the nail, the final price paid by local businessman Ralph Roberts was $3,000 (Roberts lends out the nail for local events).

The original tire was a bias-ply whitewall with a mid-1960s hubcap. It has undergone several renovations over the years, and we hear that it is again being updated.

We believe that it has a patriotic destiny. Let's go, American auto industry! Build three more of these big babies (and maybe a spare), attach them to a suitably proportioned car, air-drop the juggernaut overseas, and show the rest of the world what the U.S.A. is all about!

Our enemies would throw up their hands in humility and go home, while everybody else would see how terrific we are, and concede that we really do need all of their oil.