CARS can be objects of desire and the bonnet badge an indicator of wealth and status. Yet the four small patches of rubber that do the vital job of attaching them to the road stir little emotion. A third of drivers cannot name the make of tyre on their car. Nor do they know that the dominant global brands have been fighting a losing battle for 15 or so years against Chinese competitors and now have a chance of winning back ground.

The established tyremakers have advantages over the industry they serve. They have margins that outstrip even Germany’s luxury carmakers. Supplying manufacturers accounts for only a third of revenues of a typical tyre firm and even less of the profits. The rest comes from replacing tyres on vehicles on the road, which wear out every four years or so.

The expansion of the global vehicle fleet, forecast to grow by around 3.5% a year, helps gradually to reduce firms’ dependence on the cyclical market for new cars. Tyremakers also benefit by selling most of their wares to thousands of distributors. They are fragmented and weak compared with carmakers, and less inclined to drive hard bargains.

Once, the big tyremakers could divvy up this growing pie. In 2000 the top five—Bridgestone, Michelin, Continental, Goodyear and Pirelli—accounted for over two-thirds of the market. Their share has since deflated to under half (see chart) as China’s domestic tyre industry grew as rapidly as its carmakers. Some estimates reckon there are 250 Chinese family-owned or state-run businesses (the biggest is Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber). Jean-Claude Kihn, Goodyear’s boss for Europe, Middle East and Africa, reckons there could be many more. The lure of a trophy asset also tempted ChemChina, a Chinese chemicals giant, to acquire Pirelli, the sole supplier of tyres to Formula 1 motor racing, for €7.1bn ($7.7bn) in 2015. Chinese tyres are cheap but lack the performance or longevity of pricier brands. But as David Lesne of UBS, a bank, points out, distributors had an incentive to push them. Though selling for as little as half the price of premium tyres, distributors made margins of up to 20% (compared with as little as 5% for established brands). The premium manufacturers have cut costs and shifted production to cheaper places. Another helpful trend, oddly, is rising raw-material prices. After three or four years of oversupply of natural rubber and low oil prices, the main ingredients of synthetic rubber, these costs are rising. This will cause short-term pain for the big tyremakers. But as these account for 30% of costs for big firms and 60% for China’s newcomers, the latter will have much less scope to avoid putting up prices, eventually eroding their price advantage. Bigger wheels are also pumping up the old guard. Those over 17 inches in diameter require the premium tyres mostly made by established firms. The clamour to drive SUVs, which accounted for two-thirds of car sales in America in 2016, and a vogue for putting larger rims on humdrum cars means the appetite for these, which are at least twice as profitable as smaller ones, is growing fast. The big tyremakers are making the largest investments in new capacity to meet the need. Larger Chinese tyremakers are also spending to make bigger tyres but most of China’s minnows, after years of competing furiously on price, have precious little spare cash for such investment.

Tyremaking should also be largely immune from all the disruption in carmaking. Electric and autonomous cars, after all, will still need tyres. Fleets of robotaxis and shared vehicles will favour the established firms, says Mr Lesne. Fleet managers tend to go for their harder-wearing, safer tyres. For big tyremakers the pressure applied by Chinese incomers is easing.