I didn't know the idiom, "the rubber meets (hits) the road." So I was drawn to the passage, “When it comes to Ebola, the rubber met the road at the Firestone rubber plantation” appearing in NPR’s (October 6) article under the title, “Firestone did what governments have not: Stopped Ebola in its tracks,” which reads:
“The classic slogan for Firestone tire was “where the rubber meets the
road.” When it comes to Ebola, the rubber met the road at the
Firestone rubber plantation in Harbel, Liberia. Harbel is a company
town not far from the capital of Monrovia. Firestone workers and their
families make up a community of 80,000 people across the plantation.
Firestone detected its first Ebola case on March 30, when an
employee’s wife arrived from northern Liberia and was diagnosed with
the disease. Since then Firestone has done a remarkable job of keeping
the virus at bay.”
Obviously, the line “the rubber met the road at the Firestone rubber plantation” is associated with Firestone’s familiar product slogan, and is used here, I guess, to mean that the Firestone rubber plantation kept the prevalence of Ebola virus at bay.
I wonder if I can use the phrase, “the rubber meets the road at (place)” in the sense of keeping a problem under the firm control” as a generic mention, without any specific reference to the Firestone slogan.
Is “When it comes to Ebola, the rubber met the road at the Firestone rubber plantation” a nonce term?
Best Answer
It really has nothing to do with keeping problems at bay or rubber in specific. There is an idiomatic phrase "where the rubber meets the road". I've found several definitions for this idiom, but this one is my favorite:
All the definitions have a common thread about getting things done, being a turning point, a crucible. The metaphor derives literally from the point where the tires on an automobile touch the road - this is the point where the friction is generated to move the car. That's the point where everything matters.
So what (I think) the author is trying to say is that when the Firestone plantation faced this big challenge - at that moment where the rubber met the road - they rose to the occasion and prevented a further Ebola outbreak.
If things had gone worse, one could just as easily have said: "When the rubber met the road, they failed miserably and everyone got sick." So it actually has nothing to do with how successful they were, but rather with the crisis point they faced.
Having said all that, the usage in the example you cited feels very awkward to me, mostly because the phrase is almost never used in past tense. (see NGram usage) Someone was clearly trying to make a play on words with the Firestone slogan, and I think they reached a little too far.