Automotive Industry Trends
Content
Automotive Industry Trends http://www.altera.com/end-markets/auto/industry/aut-industry.html
Automobiles today resemble “computers on wheels” because of the increasing number of digital systems under the hood and inside the passenger cabin. With each model year, vehicle manufacturers offer more sophisticated electronic systems addressing vehicle safety, telematics, and infotainment (see Figure 1). The costs associated with these sophisticated systems are also rising. Automotive electronics now account for 22 percent of a vehicle's cost and are projected to increase to up to 40 percent by 2010.
• • • • • •
Programmable Logic Advantage Evolution of “Platform” Concept Fast Innovation Cycle Increasing Digital Content Product Obsolescence Automotive Quality
Figure 1. Automotive Electronic Segments
Powertrain & Safety Engine Management Electronic Suspension Drive by Wire Braking Systems Power Steering Airbags Gearbox
Comfort/Convenience & Vehicle Controls Dashboard/Instrument Cluster Lights/Seats Climate Control Voice Recognition Remote Keyless Entry Security Alarm Systems Wiper/Window Control
Driver Assistance Night Vision Lane Departure Warning Adaptive Cruise Control Collision Warning Park/Reverse Assist Tire Pressure Monitoring Heads Up Display
Infotainment & Communications Telematics Navigation/GPS Multimedia Systems Audio Systems Rear Seat Entertainment Games Consoles Tuners (SDR)
Photos Courtesy: Bosch Within each of these four segments, several new applications are emerging. For example, in the infotainment segment, navigation systems are popular with new cars. In the driver assistance segment, lane departure warning systems are assisting with driver safety. Several of these applications originated from the consumer market and are now used in automotive applications. As automotive digital electrical systems and onboard networks increase, so does the amount of semiconductor content required for designing these electronic systems. This trend is expected to continue, as semiconductor content is projected to grow rapidly during the next 5 to 10 years. While the vehicle growth is projected to be flat, the semiconductor growth is projected to grow 9 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next five years (see Figure 2). Figure 2. Semiconductor Growth in Automotive Market
Source: IMS Research, Strategy Analytics, Allied Business Intelligence This phenomenal semiconductor growth is fueled by increasing multimedia-rich, in-cabin applications and safety applications such as lane departure warning systems.
Programmable Logic Advantage for Automotive Systems
Historically, ASICs and ASSPs were the semiconductor option of choice because of their cost-effective silicon solution. However, key market factors can result in the end of the ASIC-dominated era in automotive silicon use. These factors include: The rising cost of ASIC development, the increased demand for digital-intensive features, and the precipitous drop in the price of a CMOS logic gate due to smaller semiconductor technologies. Manufacturers are looking for a powerful yet cost-effective design platform to meet both the content and networking needs of their increasingly complex digital systems. Programmable logic devices (PLDs) offer a powerful, viable alternative to ASICs and ASSPs because they significantly reduce engineering development time and the cost of multiple silicon iterations. Unlike ASICs that need re-spins as designs change, PLDs can be programmed and reprogrammed as needed during the design process. They can be upgraded in the field if requirements change even after the devices are implemented in the vehicle. Without the up-front, non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs and minimum order quantities associated with ASICs, PLDs are a cost-effective choice for system design. Over the past three to four years, PLDs have grown tremendously in the automotive space. PLD growth is expected to continue to rise at 40-50 percent CAGR over the next five years.
Evolution of “Platform” Concept
The evolution of automotive designs has moved toward the “platform” concept where car model differentiation is provided with one basic design. The convergence of audio, video, and data in the automotive space is further fueling the platform concept.
Fast Automotive Innovation Cycle
Today, a typical automotive design cycle is approximately 24 to 36 months, which is much faster than the 60-month life cycle from five years ago. Short design cycle times place tremendous pressure on system suppliers to quickly prototype and demonstrate their designs to OEMs. Expect this trend to shorter development cycles to continue. PLDs are well known for their faster time-to-market while still meeting the quality, cost, and technical performance requirements of the OEMs.
Increasing Digital Content
Digital content such as navigation systems, rear seat entertainment systems, and driver assistance applications have increased and are now considered mainstream products.
Product Obsolescence
The fear of product obsolescence from ASIC and ASSP suppliers is driving the use of PLDs in automotive electronic designs. These factors require automotive designers to have a design solution that not only offers superior flexibility, but also meets performance requirements within their cost targets. PLDs, with their low cost structure and abundant device resources, provide such a solution.
Automotive Quality
As automotive digital content and control systems move to high definition, wireless communication, and multi-gigabit bandwidths, automakers and system OEMs will continue to demand top-notch quality semiconductor devices. Altera’s quality record and service to over 14,000 customers worldwide over a 20+ year history demonstrates that we are committed to supporting the highest quality and reliability customer requirements. Altera's automotive-grade products are TS16949 compliant and are tested to AEC-Q100 requirements.
History of Automobile Industry: 1900-1941
http://www.youmotorcar.com/
Find out all automobile terms in the Auto Dictionary. The fabulous story of the automobile industry from the horseless carriage days of 1900 to the streamlined model of 1940 is told in this comprehensive survey of capitalism’s favorite child and our best example of large-scale industrial enterprise. Number of model-pages on the website won't exceed number of car models produced since 1886. It has been capitalism’s favorite child partly because it has been one of capitalism’s most recent children. The railroad was born in an agricultural economy and in a country too poor to finance railroad construction. The early roads were built at the rate of a few miles a year; they were dependent on foreign capital; and they went into bankruptcy before being completed instead of (as today) afterwards. The early petroleum industry was operated largely in competition with whale oil, with kerosene its principal product and gasoline so unappreciated that it was often given away to anyone who would take the trouble to remove it. But the automobile industry (if we may date its commercial existence from 1900) spent its pioneer period in what was far from a pioneer world. Modern American industrialism dates from about the close of the Civil War, so that industrial progress had been going on for some thirty-five years when the automobile arrived. The automaker found a metalworking industry, a petroleum industry, and a steel industry waiting for him. The steel industry was already old enough to have reached a period of merger and the petroleum industry was old enough to have reached thanks to the elder Rockefeller a period of monopoly. There was also in existence a ready-made class of rich and well-to-do persons; not a large class from a contemporary standpoint, but quite large enough to absorb the 11,000 automobiles of 1903 or the 24,000 automobiles of 1905. It was also a rapidly expanding economic system which the automobile entered. The population of the United States in 1900 was 76,000,000 persons, or almost 19,000,000 families. Farm lands were still experiencing an annual increase in value. The geographical frontier may have been reached, but from an industrial standpoint great areas of the country still remained undeveloped. Wages were very low, but jobs were plentiful enough to absorb in increasing numbers the still-rising tide of immigrants (including William Knudsen of Denmark). And there was a large and growing middle class of small merchants, professional people, and salaried employees. With its great area, its large and essentially homogeneous population, its extensive natural resources, and its economic position as a very young nation, compared, for instance, to England,
where the Industrial Revolution had begun before 1800 and where the rate of industrial progress had begun to slow down before 1900, the United States was particularly well suited to support the automobile industry. Because wealth was rapidly increasing and evidences of progress were everywhere visible, most of the people lived in the happy delusion that they belonged to a classless society. Consider, for instance, the peculiarly American concept of the "common people." The common people were not thought of as the poor people, although most of them were poor. They were not thought of as the working class (and certainly not as The Workers), although most of them worked (and very few of them owned their means of production). And although each member of the group may have occasionally on, for instance, the Fourth of July rejoiced in being one of the common people, his chief interest and hope in life lay in the prospect of his becoming, if not rich, at least "successful", that is, of becoming as uncommon a person as he possibly could. Each common person, like Cabell’s hero, went earnestly about the business of making himself a figure in the earth. The point of view may have been much more sentimental than realistic, although in 1900 it may not have been as unrealistic as it is today. But it was a splendid attitude for the auto-maker’s public to possess. On the Continent and in the British Isles, the automobile was almost exclusively the possession of the upper classes. The lower and the middle classes resigned themselves, for the most part, to watching even the Fords go by. But in this country everyone felt himself entitled to succeed and it was not so many years before the automobile became the outstanding symbol of success. It was a goal which became within the reach of the many who could still, however, congratulate themselves that it was not within the reach of the mob. Thus the U.S. public was a fertile field for the auto-maker’s plowing. For the first ten years of the twentieth century, however, the progress of the automobile was slow. The car was still passing through a fundamental technical evolution, an evolution most obviously expressed by the transition from one cylinder to six. It also required a few years for the public to become accustomed to the idea of an automobile. And until about 1910 the growth of the automobile market was limited by the increase in the automobile’s price. By 1908, for instance, production had increased to only 63,000 cars (from about 5,000 in 1900), although the eight years between 1900 and 1908 had added about 13,000,000 persons to the population of the United States. But the early auto-maker was able to prosper on an extremely small volume. Thus in 1905 Joy made a profit on the sale of 503 Packards and Durant made a profit on the sale of 463 Buicks. Capitalism’s favorite child got along pretty well even as a stepchild; Cinderella had a considerable earning power even before the Prince came along to solve her problems. Yet in 1910 only about 1 person in every 200, or 1 family in every 50, was the owner of an automobile. By 1910, however, Ford had the Model T in production, and by 1912 auto prices, although still high, was gradually falling. By 1914, the industry sold 548,000 cars for $420,000,000, with the retail price down to about $1,000 a car. But the volume was unduly weighted by the Ford volume, and the price was unduly weighted by the Ford price. Even in 1914, the automobile, except for the Ford, was too expensive to be truly popular. Yet at the close of 1914 there were 1,625,000 passenger cars in the United States.
Then the auto-maker encountered his first specific stroke of great good fortune. The peace of Europe died and the automobile inherited the First World War. However unequally the (American) wealth created by that war may have been divided, enough people got some of it to make possible the sale of automobiles on a previously unimagined scale. Furthermore, between 1914 and 1916 the auto-maker not realizing that automobiles were becoming much easier to sell radically decreased the price of his car. In 1916 the retail price was about $800, compared to the $1,000 average when the war broke out. Therefore the 1914 auto output was almost doubled in 1915 and almost tripled in 1916. The Willys-Overland, with 1916 sales of 140,000 cars priced at $750 (retail), was a good example of the trend and its results. The scene opens with the electric auto, which was more popular than the gasoline buggy, and then shifts to the Middle West with the formation of the pioneer companies of Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac, Packard, Hudson, Overland and Ford. Growing pains were soon manifest in the beginnings of mergers and in the mortality rate which, despite fantastic profits, had by 1915 eliminated six out of every seven companies founded up to then. In 1917 and 1918 the war not only interrupted automobile production but almost doubled automobile prices. The wealth created by the war supported a 2,000,000-car year in 1920, but the high prices of the period also broke the back of the boom. In 1921, Cinderella was temporarily backed in the kitchen, and with a terrible accumulation of dishes to wash. In the World War period the industry emerged as a towering young giant. Control of General Motors passed from William C. Durant to the Du Ponts and it was on its way to becoming the biggest profit producer in all history. Ford bought out his minority stockholders and became king of all he surveyed. America turned its back on Europe and rolled through the dizzy twenties, led by the automobile. But in postwar America the auto-maker came into what might almost be considered a little more than his own. In the world of the 1920’s, items of income (including wages) never reverted to their prewar dimensions. It is true that prices, in general, were also much higher than they had been before the war. But this was not true of automobile prices. After the postwar panic, the auto-maker got back to about his 1916 prices. But these mid-war prices of the automobile were much lower than the prewar prices of the automobile. The automobile of 1922 sold for much less than the automobile of 1914 or of 1910 or of 1900. Indeed, the postwar automobile was selling at approximately the lowest level that auto prices had ever reached. So, measured by postwar purchasing power, the automobile was selling at strictly a bargain price. From 1922 through 1929 (eight years) the auto-maker produced 29,132,000 passenger cars, an average of not much less than 4,000,000 cars a year. He sold them (at wholesale) for $19,114,000,000. In round numbers, he produced 30,000,000 automobiles which he sold for $20,000,000,000. Thus his average wholesale price was under $700 and his average retail price was under $900. By the close of 1929 there were about 23,000,000 passenger cars in the United States, and almost three out of every four American families were the owners of an automobile. Even with every allowance for installment sales, for tradeins, and for the millions of motorists who had never bought a new car, an extraordinarily large proportion of the American people did succeed in becoming owners of cars.
There are comparatively few persons to whom an automobile is unqualifiedly a necessity. There are even fewer persons to whom the purchase of a car does not involve a substantial expenditure. Even to the man who buys a very much used car for $25 or $50, the automobile is a considerable purchase, for to such a man the amounts mentioned are important money. Yet in three families out of four, the desire to own an automobile was realized. And as has already been said once a man became accustomed to mechanical transportation he never could reconcile himself to any other method of moving about from one point to another. From a strictly objective standpoint, the benefits of owning an automobile are a little tenuous. It has brought the farmer into closer touch with the city, or at least with the nearest town. Yet the pre-automobile farmer usually had a horse and a wagon and was not as completely isolated as we now like to think. And even with the automobile the farmer group has been one of the least prosperous, the least secure, and the least satisfied of our social classes. The automobile has also permitted the man who works in a large city to live in a suburb adjacent to it. But the people who live in these suburbs would not, under any circumstances, be living in the slum districts. There cannot be much difference between the air of the Bronx and the air of Bronxville, although no doubt there is a great difference in the atmospheres. The suburbanite does manage to combine the metropolitan with the provincial to quite an astonishing extent, but this capacity does not contribute much to the progress of civilization. As for time-saving, an hour saved with an automobile usually involves at least an hour spent in an automobile, and the kinds of creatures who nowadays enjoy automobile riding must be rapidly getting down to small children and dogs. Subjectively, however, the influence of the automobile has been enormous. We are not a landowning people, and we are not as much a home-owning people as we were in more primitive times. There are millions of persons whose automobiles are their only considerable personal possessions, and to the automobile the frustrated property instinct vigorously clings. And the automobile is such a remarkably personal possession. It is a tonic to the ego of the owner. The physical escape made possible by the automobile is limited; five miles away or five hundred the roads are just as crowded and the countryside is much the same. But from a psychological standpoint, there is a great escape in driving a car. The automobile gives a man a horsepower he can ride. He feels himself equal to anyone, and superior to the pedestrian. This sense of power is reached only at the cost of from 30,000 to 35,000 lives and of several hundred thousand injuries of varying gravity per annum, but public opinion does not seem interested in holding against the automobile its appalling record of manslaughter. Perhaps the instinct of the public is here correct; possibly an automobile which was not fast enough to do any harm would not be fast enough to do any good. At any rate, the automobile has supplied a sense of power to millions of persons whose need for such a feeling is very great. The life of man has always been hard on the ego of man, and rarely more so than in the complex society of today. Thus the great function of the automobile has been to give a delusion of grandeur to the average man. During the 1920’s, no other industry was as prosperous as the automobile industry, although the radio (essentially a very similar product) also did for itself very well. Among other large and
older industries, the coal business and the textile business were already in a depression, while the automobile still flourished and there were many consumer-goods industries (for example, the furniture industry) that blamed the automobile for the difficulties they were having in snaring the public’s dollar. In 1928 a convention of tombstone makers in New Jersey passed resolutions deploring the installment selling of automobiles, and arguing that people had so impoverished themselves buying automobiles that they did not have enough money left to provide suitable memorials for their dead. To these resolutions, Automotive Industries replied that at any rate the grave marker business did not have to struggle with the used-tombstone problem. Apparently competition between industries approaches the cutthroat only when the products of the industries are so similar that one product can be substituted for the other as, for instance, rayon for silk, and the radio for the phonograph. Still, the public did put an almost incredible portion of its spending money into automobiles. The retail cost of new passenger cars in 1929 was about $4,000,000,000. Between $2,500,000,000 and $3,000,000,000 was spent on used cars. The cost of gasoline and tires and garages and parts and repairs brought the total automotive expenditure up to and more than $10,000,000,000. And in 1929 $10,000,000,000 was 20 per cent of the total retail expenditure of $50,000,000,000. Out of every $5 of consumer payments for everything except rent and insurance, $1 was spent on account of the automobile. In the late 1920’s, the automobile seemed to be the ideal product functioning in the ideal universe. What, then, happened to the automobile? What happened to it was, chiefly, the depression of the 1930’s. As the automobile was not the cause, but the beneficiary, of prosperity, so it was not the cause, but the victim, of depression. And to the depression the automobile was particularly vulnerable. The industry looked like a uniquely robust one, and the auto-maker was confident that nothing unpleasant could happen to it. But all that glittered was not gold, and there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in McGuffey’s Reader. The automobile did, indeed, epitomize the unreal and the evanescent aspects of 1929 prosperity. The industry was selling nearly 4,000,000 new cars a year, but less than 1,000,000 of these sales were being made to buyers who had never before owned a car. The other 3,000,000 auto buyers were trading in cars which were often not more than a year old, and which usually had several years of useful service left in them. And in the last three years of the 1920's the dealer had more used cars than new cars for sale. What would be said of the shoe industry if the shoe retailer had to sell 400,000,000 pairs of used shoes in order to sell 300,000,000 pairs of new shoes? Or what would be said of the shoe- wearer if he traded in a pair of shoes which he had worn for only one or two months in order to buy a new pair of shoes which had, perhaps, extra-long laces or a fur-lined tongue or solid-gold eyelets? To complete the analogy, however, it would also have to be possible for the shoe-wearer to buy his shoes on the installment plan, and to trade in his old shoes for enough money to cover the down payment on the new pair. Under these circumstances, the man who wore the shoes might not be considered nearly as peculiar as the men who made and sold them. The automobile is essentially a durable type of consumer goods and the artificial structure of auto-selling arose from the attempt to evade this durability. The consumer was subjected to every possible form of pressure and inducement to get him to buy a new car while the old car was still
good. The manufacturer produced an endless stream of "improvements», many of which had little or no significance from the consumer’s point of view, although to the automobile copywriter every new gadget was "revolutionary." The salesman, the advertising agent, and public opinion in general combined to make the "prospect" not so much proud of a new car as ashamed of an old one. And the unfortunate auto dealer kept the whole extravaganza in motion by allowing the motorist more on his trade-in than the trade-in was likely to be sold for when it made its appearance on the used-car lot. The auto-maker created his problem of mass selling because he had been so successful in solving his problem of mass production. The underlying difficulty in the situation was the machine tool that is, the tremendous multiplication of production made possible by the application of machinery to the production job. The automaker had a capacity of less than 8,000 cars in 1900. He had a capacity of about 800,000 cars in 1915. And he had a capacity of some 8,000,000 cars in 1929. Even this capacity figure is based on an eight-hour day. Had the auto-maker gone in for really maximum production, he could have operated twenty-four hours a day (with three eighthour shifts) and presumably have turned out something in the neighborhood of 24,000,000 cars a year. True, the auto-makers never actually manufactured as many as 5,000,000 passenger cars in a single year. But between 1922 and 1929, they almost doubled their production without lowering their prices. In 1922, the industry sold about 2,500,000 cars at $620 (wholesale) a car. In 1929 it sold nearly 5,000,000 cars at $622 (wholesale) a car. The 1929 car was much better than the 1922 car, and the 1929 manufacturer did not make nearly as much per car. But these arguments (much like the one about the improved car) have nothing to do with the proposition that the automaker was constantly increasing his output and never (after 1922) decreasing his price. A 1929 automobile did not cost any more than a 1922 automobile, but all the 1929 automobiles together cost the public twice as much as all the 1922 automobiles. At this rate, all the 1937 automobiles would have cost the public twice as much as all the 1929 automobiles, which would have been about $8,000,000,000. You cannot keep pouring water into even the deepest pitcher without eventually filling it up. Had there been a hundred automobile producers each with a capacity of 50,000 automobiles, the price of the automobile would have decreased as the volume of the auto-maker increased. But even in the 1920’s there were only about a dozen producers with any significant production. And when there are so few producers, the "law" of supply and demand is invariably repealed. The auto-maker was more genuinely competitive than almost any other large producer; the Model T, for instance, was competed out of existence while the boom was still at its height. But competition tended to take the form of better cars for the same money rather than the same cars for less money, and on an overall basis the auto-maker was successful in preventing prices from declining as production increased. For the first time the problem of producing cars became secondary to the problem of selling them, and the auto maker was faced with time-payments, tradeins, used cars and development of export business. Ford’s famous Model T disappeared and the picture changed rapidly with the rise of Chrysler. The industry as a whole reached its top in 1925, and then declined into the
precarious decade of the thirties. Today it enters a new and artificial era under a war economy, with many fundamental problems unsolved. The arrival of the depression quickly demonstrated how far out on the limb the auto-maker had clambered. With the national income reduced by about one-half, the auto output was reduced by more than three-quarters. On the even more significant basis of dollar sales, the auto decline was even greater. The wholesale value of the 1932 automobile was only $650,000,000, against the $2,981,000,000 of 1929. Thus the 1932 income of the auto-makers was not much more than onefifth of what it had been in 1929. And although the drop in auto income was caused chiefly by the drop in general purchasing power, the auto shrinkage was particularly heavy, because so many of its former sales had depended upon the psychology of the prosperity period. From the excessive loss of automobile income came the excessive mortality of automobile companies. You will remember that there were 87 exhibitors at the 1921 automobile show but only 46 at the 1930 show. Even in the prosperity period, the weaker auto units were falling off rapidly. But during the depression the smaller companies simply disappeared. Even the larger independents came out when they came out with what would appear to be a permanently impaired earning power. The auto companies were not well adapted to a long period of drastically reduced income. Their capacity for self-financing had been so great that they had not troubled much to build up capital reserves. Profits had gone into extensive plant expansion and extremely generous dividends, so that there was not much to fall back upon when the rainy day finally arrived. Even then no one could have suspected that the rain would be so heavy or that the downpour would last so long. The collapse during the 1930-32 periods and the failure of the "independents" to recover from it has basically altered the character of the automobile industry. About a dozen big steel companies went staggering through the Hoover period of the depression, but they all managed to stagger through to the arrival of comparatively better times. And they have all participated in the recovery period on about the same proportional basis that they participated in the good times. For instance, the United States Steel Corporation’s percentage of the total steel output is probably now somewhat less than it was in 1929. Thus the steel industry today is as competitive as it has been at any time since 1900, which, to be sure, is not nearly as competitive as the steel industry would like to have you think. But the monopolistic aspects of the steel industry are no more pronounced today than they were a dozen years ago. With the automobile industry, the situation is very different. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler have made more than 90 per cent of the automobiles during the past ten years. During the greater part of that period, the other companies have not been able to make any money on the other 10 per cent of the auto business, and even in their best years few of them have been able to make very much money. Now, for a while, they may extract some profit from war business, but it does not at the moment seem likely that they will ever again become major factors in the production of four-wheeled self-propelled vehicles of which gasoline is the motive power. The crystallization of the automobile industry into its present form appears to have become extremely solid.
It is an odd reflection that the steel industry, which has been subject to very marked monopolistic influences for the past forty years, is now, from the standpoint of the number of significant producers, much more competitive than the automobile industry, although the auto industry was the last refuge of competition for a good many years. In an industry so thoroughly dominated by three producers, it is impossible to prevent a decline in the competitive spirit. A hundred companies might cut one another’s throats (not that that would do any particular good), but three companies are bound to tip their hats politely when they pass each other on the street. This statement does not consider the Government’s antitrust suit, which refers only to automobile financing, and which is perhaps rather more interesting than important. And it is not meant to imply that General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler have reached any agreements, oral or written, which are contrary to the Sherman Act, the Clayton Act, or the spirit of the late Adam Smith. When only three companies are left, it is not necessary to reach any agreements; whatever seems appropriate to the situation can be performed by reliance upon instinct. And so the automobile industry has become much like all the other big industries. The development of monopolies has gone forward, with no important assistance from bankers or other persons commonly and correctly associated with the monopolistic idea. Through a process of attrition, the auto industry has reached a goal which in other industries was created or at least accelerated by a process of co-operation. In or about 1900 a new thing did come out of the West, and it remained quite remarkably a new thing for the next thirty years. But perhaps its differences from other industries were only superficial; at least its resemblance to the others is now much more pronounced. In the opinion of the writer, it is correct to describe the auto industry as capitalism’s favorite child, but perhaps that description has been used here with the feeling that the automobile industry might have accomplished something more than the other members of the family. But that the child should grow up to resemble the parents is no doubt what one should legitimately expect.
Automobile Industry The Horseless Carriage The First Automobile Race Gasoline vs. Steam and Electricity The Automobile Progresses Beginnings in Detroit The Oldsmobile The Cadillac The Buick The Ford Motor Company The Packard Motor Car Company The cars of 1900-1908 Monopoly and Merger The Selden patent General Motors The Profit Formula The Overland The Hudson The Studebaker The Ford again General Motors Again The Growth of the Industry The Concentration of the Industry The War Boom Henry Ford’s Difficulties The difficulties of General Motors America in the War After The War The First Crisis: A Bad Year The First Crisis: A Worse Year New Times, New Problems Shifts and Changes Price Reductions A Favorable Year The Golden Age The End of Model T The End of Prosperity The Vanishing Customer Receiverships Selective Recovery Labor Unions and Strikes The Industry Recovers Repetition of a Pattern
Automobiles today resemble “computers on wheels” because of the increasing number of digital systems under the hood and inside the passenger cabin. With each model year, vehicle manufacturers offer more sophisticated electronic systems addressing vehicle safety, telematics, and infotainment (see Figure 1). The costs associated with these sophisticated systems are also rising. Automotive electronics now account for 22 percent of a vehicle's cost and are projected to increase to up to 40 percent by 2010.
• • • • • •
Programmable Logic Advantage Evolution of “Platform” Concept Fast Innovation Cycle Increasing Digital Content Product Obsolescence Automotive Quality
Figure 1. Automotive Electronic Segments
Powertrain & Safety Engine Management Electronic Suspension Drive by Wire Braking Systems Power Steering Airbags Gearbox
Comfort/Convenience & Vehicle Controls Dashboard/Instrument Cluster Lights/Seats Climate Control Voice Recognition Remote Keyless Entry Security Alarm Systems Wiper/Window Control
Driver Assistance Night Vision Lane Departure Warning Adaptive Cruise Control Collision Warning Park/Reverse Assist Tire Pressure Monitoring Heads Up Display
Infotainment & Communications Telematics Navigation/GPS Multimedia Systems Audio Systems Rear Seat Entertainment Games Consoles Tuners (SDR)
Photos Courtesy: Bosch Within each of these four segments, several new applications are emerging. For example, in the infotainment segment, navigation systems are popular with new cars. In the driver assistance segment, lane departure warning systems are assisting with driver safety. Several of these applications originated from the consumer market and are now used in automotive applications. As automotive digital electrical systems and onboard networks increase, so does the amount of semiconductor content required for designing these electronic systems. This trend is expected to continue, as semiconductor content is projected to grow rapidly during the next 5 to 10 years. While the vehicle growth is projected to be flat, the semiconductor growth is projected to grow 9 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next five years (see Figure 2). Figure 2. Semiconductor Growth in Automotive Market
Source: IMS Research, Strategy Analytics, Allied Business Intelligence This phenomenal semiconductor growth is fueled by increasing multimedia-rich, in-cabin applications and safety applications such as lane departure warning systems.
Programmable Logic Advantage for Automotive Systems
Historically, ASICs and ASSPs were the semiconductor option of choice because of their cost-effective silicon solution. However, key market factors can result in the end of the ASIC-dominated era in automotive silicon use. These factors include: The rising cost of ASIC development, the increased demand for digital-intensive features, and the precipitous drop in the price of a CMOS logic gate due to smaller semiconductor technologies. Manufacturers are looking for a powerful yet cost-effective design platform to meet both the content and networking needs of their increasingly complex digital systems. Programmable logic devices (PLDs) offer a powerful, viable alternative to ASICs and ASSPs because they significantly reduce engineering development time and the cost of multiple silicon iterations. Unlike ASICs that need re-spins as designs change, PLDs can be programmed and reprogrammed as needed during the design process. They can be upgraded in the field if requirements change even after the devices are implemented in the vehicle. Without the up-front, non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs and minimum order quantities associated with ASICs, PLDs are a cost-effective choice for system design. Over the past three to four years, PLDs have grown tremendously in the automotive space. PLD growth is expected to continue to rise at 40-50 percent CAGR over the next five years.
Evolution of “Platform” Concept
The evolution of automotive designs has moved toward the “platform” concept where car model differentiation is provided with one basic design. The convergence of audio, video, and data in the automotive space is further fueling the platform concept.
Fast Automotive Innovation Cycle
Today, a typical automotive design cycle is approximately 24 to 36 months, which is much faster than the 60-month life cycle from five years ago. Short design cycle times place tremendous pressure on system suppliers to quickly prototype and demonstrate their designs to OEMs. Expect this trend to shorter development cycles to continue. PLDs are well known for their faster time-to-market while still meeting the quality, cost, and technical performance requirements of the OEMs.
Increasing Digital Content
Digital content such as navigation systems, rear seat entertainment systems, and driver assistance applications have increased and are now considered mainstream products.
Product Obsolescence
The fear of product obsolescence from ASIC and ASSP suppliers is driving the use of PLDs in automotive electronic designs. These factors require automotive designers to have a design solution that not only offers superior flexibility, but also meets performance requirements within their cost targets. PLDs, with their low cost structure and abundant device resources, provide such a solution.
Automotive Quality
As automotive digital content and control systems move to high definition, wireless communication, and multi-gigabit bandwidths, automakers and system OEMs will continue to demand top-notch quality semiconductor devices. Altera’s quality record and service to over 14,000 customers worldwide over a 20+ year history demonstrates that we are committed to supporting the highest quality and reliability customer requirements. Altera's automotive-grade products are TS16949 compliant and are tested to AEC-Q100 requirements.
History of Automobile Industry: 1900-1941
http://www.youmotorcar.com/
Find out all automobile terms in the Auto Dictionary. The fabulous story of the automobile industry from the horseless carriage days of 1900 to the streamlined model of 1940 is told in this comprehensive survey of capitalism’s favorite child and our best example of large-scale industrial enterprise. Number of model-pages on the website won't exceed number of car models produced since 1886. It has been capitalism’s favorite child partly because it has been one of capitalism’s most recent children. The railroad was born in an agricultural economy and in a country too poor to finance railroad construction. The early roads were built at the rate of a few miles a year; they were dependent on foreign capital; and they went into bankruptcy before being completed instead of (as today) afterwards. The early petroleum industry was operated largely in competition with whale oil, with kerosene its principal product and gasoline so unappreciated that it was often given away to anyone who would take the trouble to remove it. But the automobile industry (if we may date its commercial existence from 1900) spent its pioneer period in what was far from a pioneer world. Modern American industrialism dates from about the close of the Civil War, so that industrial progress had been going on for some thirty-five years when the automobile arrived. The automaker found a metalworking industry, a petroleum industry, and a steel industry waiting for him. The steel industry was already old enough to have reached a period of merger and the petroleum industry was old enough to have reached thanks to the elder Rockefeller a period of monopoly. There was also in existence a ready-made class of rich and well-to-do persons; not a large class from a contemporary standpoint, but quite large enough to absorb the 11,000 automobiles of 1903 or the 24,000 automobiles of 1905. It was also a rapidly expanding economic system which the automobile entered. The population of the United States in 1900 was 76,000,000 persons, or almost 19,000,000 families. Farm lands were still experiencing an annual increase in value. The geographical frontier may have been reached, but from an industrial standpoint great areas of the country still remained undeveloped. Wages were very low, but jobs were plentiful enough to absorb in increasing numbers the still-rising tide of immigrants (including William Knudsen of Denmark). And there was a large and growing middle class of small merchants, professional people, and salaried employees. With its great area, its large and essentially homogeneous population, its extensive natural resources, and its economic position as a very young nation, compared, for instance, to England,
where the Industrial Revolution had begun before 1800 and where the rate of industrial progress had begun to slow down before 1900, the United States was particularly well suited to support the automobile industry. Because wealth was rapidly increasing and evidences of progress were everywhere visible, most of the people lived in the happy delusion that they belonged to a classless society. Consider, for instance, the peculiarly American concept of the "common people." The common people were not thought of as the poor people, although most of them were poor. They were not thought of as the working class (and certainly not as The Workers), although most of them worked (and very few of them owned their means of production). And although each member of the group may have occasionally on, for instance, the Fourth of July rejoiced in being one of the common people, his chief interest and hope in life lay in the prospect of his becoming, if not rich, at least "successful", that is, of becoming as uncommon a person as he possibly could. Each common person, like Cabell’s hero, went earnestly about the business of making himself a figure in the earth. The point of view may have been much more sentimental than realistic, although in 1900 it may not have been as unrealistic as it is today. But it was a splendid attitude for the auto-maker’s public to possess. On the Continent and in the British Isles, the automobile was almost exclusively the possession of the upper classes. The lower and the middle classes resigned themselves, for the most part, to watching even the Fords go by. But in this country everyone felt himself entitled to succeed and it was not so many years before the automobile became the outstanding symbol of success. It was a goal which became within the reach of the many who could still, however, congratulate themselves that it was not within the reach of the mob. Thus the U.S. public was a fertile field for the auto-maker’s plowing. For the first ten years of the twentieth century, however, the progress of the automobile was slow. The car was still passing through a fundamental technical evolution, an evolution most obviously expressed by the transition from one cylinder to six. It also required a few years for the public to become accustomed to the idea of an automobile. And until about 1910 the growth of the automobile market was limited by the increase in the automobile’s price. By 1908, for instance, production had increased to only 63,000 cars (from about 5,000 in 1900), although the eight years between 1900 and 1908 had added about 13,000,000 persons to the population of the United States. But the early auto-maker was able to prosper on an extremely small volume. Thus in 1905 Joy made a profit on the sale of 503 Packards and Durant made a profit on the sale of 463 Buicks. Capitalism’s favorite child got along pretty well even as a stepchild; Cinderella had a considerable earning power even before the Prince came along to solve her problems. Yet in 1910 only about 1 person in every 200, or 1 family in every 50, was the owner of an automobile. By 1910, however, Ford had the Model T in production, and by 1912 auto prices, although still high, was gradually falling. By 1914, the industry sold 548,000 cars for $420,000,000, with the retail price down to about $1,000 a car. But the volume was unduly weighted by the Ford volume, and the price was unduly weighted by the Ford price. Even in 1914, the automobile, except for the Ford, was too expensive to be truly popular. Yet at the close of 1914 there were 1,625,000 passenger cars in the United States.
Then the auto-maker encountered his first specific stroke of great good fortune. The peace of Europe died and the automobile inherited the First World War. However unequally the (American) wealth created by that war may have been divided, enough people got some of it to make possible the sale of automobiles on a previously unimagined scale. Furthermore, between 1914 and 1916 the auto-maker not realizing that automobiles were becoming much easier to sell radically decreased the price of his car. In 1916 the retail price was about $800, compared to the $1,000 average when the war broke out. Therefore the 1914 auto output was almost doubled in 1915 and almost tripled in 1916. The Willys-Overland, with 1916 sales of 140,000 cars priced at $750 (retail), was a good example of the trend and its results. The scene opens with the electric auto, which was more popular than the gasoline buggy, and then shifts to the Middle West with the formation of the pioneer companies of Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac, Packard, Hudson, Overland and Ford. Growing pains were soon manifest in the beginnings of mergers and in the mortality rate which, despite fantastic profits, had by 1915 eliminated six out of every seven companies founded up to then. In 1917 and 1918 the war not only interrupted automobile production but almost doubled automobile prices. The wealth created by the war supported a 2,000,000-car year in 1920, but the high prices of the period also broke the back of the boom. In 1921, Cinderella was temporarily backed in the kitchen, and with a terrible accumulation of dishes to wash. In the World War period the industry emerged as a towering young giant. Control of General Motors passed from William C. Durant to the Du Ponts and it was on its way to becoming the biggest profit producer in all history. Ford bought out his minority stockholders and became king of all he surveyed. America turned its back on Europe and rolled through the dizzy twenties, led by the automobile. But in postwar America the auto-maker came into what might almost be considered a little more than his own. In the world of the 1920’s, items of income (including wages) never reverted to their prewar dimensions. It is true that prices, in general, were also much higher than they had been before the war. But this was not true of automobile prices. After the postwar panic, the auto-maker got back to about his 1916 prices. But these mid-war prices of the automobile were much lower than the prewar prices of the automobile. The automobile of 1922 sold for much less than the automobile of 1914 or of 1910 or of 1900. Indeed, the postwar automobile was selling at approximately the lowest level that auto prices had ever reached. So, measured by postwar purchasing power, the automobile was selling at strictly a bargain price. From 1922 through 1929 (eight years) the auto-maker produced 29,132,000 passenger cars, an average of not much less than 4,000,000 cars a year. He sold them (at wholesale) for $19,114,000,000. In round numbers, he produced 30,000,000 automobiles which he sold for $20,000,000,000. Thus his average wholesale price was under $700 and his average retail price was under $900. By the close of 1929 there were about 23,000,000 passenger cars in the United States, and almost three out of every four American families were the owners of an automobile. Even with every allowance for installment sales, for tradeins, and for the millions of motorists who had never bought a new car, an extraordinarily large proportion of the American people did succeed in becoming owners of cars.
There are comparatively few persons to whom an automobile is unqualifiedly a necessity. There are even fewer persons to whom the purchase of a car does not involve a substantial expenditure. Even to the man who buys a very much used car for $25 or $50, the automobile is a considerable purchase, for to such a man the amounts mentioned are important money. Yet in three families out of four, the desire to own an automobile was realized. And as has already been said once a man became accustomed to mechanical transportation he never could reconcile himself to any other method of moving about from one point to another. From a strictly objective standpoint, the benefits of owning an automobile are a little tenuous. It has brought the farmer into closer touch with the city, or at least with the nearest town. Yet the pre-automobile farmer usually had a horse and a wagon and was not as completely isolated as we now like to think. And even with the automobile the farmer group has been one of the least prosperous, the least secure, and the least satisfied of our social classes. The automobile has also permitted the man who works in a large city to live in a suburb adjacent to it. But the people who live in these suburbs would not, under any circumstances, be living in the slum districts. There cannot be much difference between the air of the Bronx and the air of Bronxville, although no doubt there is a great difference in the atmospheres. The suburbanite does manage to combine the metropolitan with the provincial to quite an astonishing extent, but this capacity does not contribute much to the progress of civilization. As for time-saving, an hour saved with an automobile usually involves at least an hour spent in an automobile, and the kinds of creatures who nowadays enjoy automobile riding must be rapidly getting down to small children and dogs. Subjectively, however, the influence of the automobile has been enormous. We are not a landowning people, and we are not as much a home-owning people as we were in more primitive times. There are millions of persons whose automobiles are their only considerable personal possessions, and to the automobile the frustrated property instinct vigorously clings. And the automobile is such a remarkably personal possession. It is a tonic to the ego of the owner. The physical escape made possible by the automobile is limited; five miles away or five hundred the roads are just as crowded and the countryside is much the same. But from a psychological standpoint, there is a great escape in driving a car. The automobile gives a man a horsepower he can ride. He feels himself equal to anyone, and superior to the pedestrian. This sense of power is reached only at the cost of from 30,000 to 35,000 lives and of several hundred thousand injuries of varying gravity per annum, but public opinion does not seem interested in holding against the automobile its appalling record of manslaughter. Perhaps the instinct of the public is here correct; possibly an automobile which was not fast enough to do any harm would not be fast enough to do any good. At any rate, the automobile has supplied a sense of power to millions of persons whose need for such a feeling is very great. The life of man has always been hard on the ego of man, and rarely more so than in the complex society of today. Thus the great function of the automobile has been to give a delusion of grandeur to the average man. During the 1920’s, no other industry was as prosperous as the automobile industry, although the radio (essentially a very similar product) also did for itself very well. Among other large and
older industries, the coal business and the textile business were already in a depression, while the automobile still flourished and there were many consumer-goods industries (for example, the furniture industry) that blamed the automobile for the difficulties they were having in snaring the public’s dollar. In 1928 a convention of tombstone makers in New Jersey passed resolutions deploring the installment selling of automobiles, and arguing that people had so impoverished themselves buying automobiles that they did not have enough money left to provide suitable memorials for their dead. To these resolutions, Automotive Industries replied that at any rate the grave marker business did not have to struggle with the used-tombstone problem. Apparently competition between industries approaches the cutthroat only when the products of the industries are so similar that one product can be substituted for the other as, for instance, rayon for silk, and the radio for the phonograph. Still, the public did put an almost incredible portion of its spending money into automobiles. The retail cost of new passenger cars in 1929 was about $4,000,000,000. Between $2,500,000,000 and $3,000,000,000 was spent on used cars. The cost of gasoline and tires and garages and parts and repairs brought the total automotive expenditure up to and more than $10,000,000,000. And in 1929 $10,000,000,000 was 20 per cent of the total retail expenditure of $50,000,000,000. Out of every $5 of consumer payments for everything except rent and insurance, $1 was spent on account of the automobile. In the late 1920’s, the automobile seemed to be the ideal product functioning in the ideal universe. What, then, happened to the automobile? What happened to it was, chiefly, the depression of the 1930’s. As the automobile was not the cause, but the beneficiary, of prosperity, so it was not the cause, but the victim, of depression. And to the depression the automobile was particularly vulnerable. The industry looked like a uniquely robust one, and the auto-maker was confident that nothing unpleasant could happen to it. But all that glittered was not gold, and there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in McGuffey’s Reader. The automobile did, indeed, epitomize the unreal and the evanescent aspects of 1929 prosperity. The industry was selling nearly 4,000,000 new cars a year, but less than 1,000,000 of these sales were being made to buyers who had never before owned a car. The other 3,000,000 auto buyers were trading in cars which were often not more than a year old, and which usually had several years of useful service left in them. And in the last three years of the 1920's the dealer had more used cars than new cars for sale. What would be said of the shoe industry if the shoe retailer had to sell 400,000,000 pairs of used shoes in order to sell 300,000,000 pairs of new shoes? Or what would be said of the shoe- wearer if he traded in a pair of shoes which he had worn for only one or two months in order to buy a new pair of shoes which had, perhaps, extra-long laces or a fur-lined tongue or solid-gold eyelets? To complete the analogy, however, it would also have to be possible for the shoe-wearer to buy his shoes on the installment plan, and to trade in his old shoes for enough money to cover the down payment on the new pair. Under these circumstances, the man who wore the shoes might not be considered nearly as peculiar as the men who made and sold them. The automobile is essentially a durable type of consumer goods and the artificial structure of auto-selling arose from the attempt to evade this durability. The consumer was subjected to every possible form of pressure and inducement to get him to buy a new car while the old car was still
good. The manufacturer produced an endless stream of "improvements», many of which had little or no significance from the consumer’s point of view, although to the automobile copywriter every new gadget was "revolutionary." The salesman, the advertising agent, and public opinion in general combined to make the "prospect" not so much proud of a new car as ashamed of an old one. And the unfortunate auto dealer kept the whole extravaganza in motion by allowing the motorist more on his trade-in than the trade-in was likely to be sold for when it made its appearance on the used-car lot. The auto-maker created his problem of mass selling because he had been so successful in solving his problem of mass production. The underlying difficulty in the situation was the machine tool that is, the tremendous multiplication of production made possible by the application of machinery to the production job. The automaker had a capacity of less than 8,000 cars in 1900. He had a capacity of about 800,000 cars in 1915. And he had a capacity of some 8,000,000 cars in 1929. Even this capacity figure is based on an eight-hour day. Had the auto-maker gone in for really maximum production, he could have operated twenty-four hours a day (with three eighthour shifts) and presumably have turned out something in the neighborhood of 24,000,000 cars a year. True, the auto-makers never actually manufactured as many as 5,000,000 passenger cars in a single year. But between 1922 and 1929, they almost doubled their production without lowering their prices. In 1922, the industry sold about 2,500,000 cars at $620 (wholesale) a car. In 1929 it sold nearly 5,000,000 cars at $622 (wholesale) a car. The 1929 car was much better than the 1922 car, and the 1929 manufacturer did not make nearly as much per car. But these arguments (much like the one about the improved car) have nothing to do with the proposition that the automaker was constantly increasing his output and never (after 1922) decreasing his price. A 1929 automobile did not cost any more than a 1922 automobile, but all the 1929 automobiles together cost the public twice as much as all the 1922 automobiles. At this rate, all the 1937 automobiles would have cost the public twice as much as all the 1929 automobiles, which would have been about $8,000,000,000. You cannot keep pouring water into even the deepest pitcher without eventually filling it up. Had there been a hundred automobile producers each with a capacity of 50,000 automobiles, the price of the automobile would have decreased as the volume of the auto-maker increased. But even in the 1920’s there were only about a dozen producers with any significant production. And when there are so few producers, the "law" of supply and demand is invariably repealed. The auto-maker was more genuinely competitive than almost any other large producer; the Model T, for instance, was competed out of existence while the boom was still at its height. But competition tended to take the form of better cars for the same money rather than the same cars for less money, and on an overall basis the auto-maker was successful in preventing prices from declining as production increased. For the first time the problem of producing cars became secondary to the problem of selling them, and the auto maker was faced with time-payments, tradeins, used cars and development of export business. Ford’s famous Model T disappeared and the picture changed rapidly with the rise of Chrysler. The industry as a whole reached its top in 1925, and then declined into the
precarious decade of the thirties. Today it enters a new and artificial era under a war economy, with many fundamental problems unsolved. The arrival of the depression quickly demonstrated how far out on the limb the auto-maker had clambered. With the national income reduced by about one-half, the auto output was reduced by more than three-quarters. On the even more significant basis of dollar sales, the auto decline was even greater. The wholesale value of the 1932 automobile was only $650,000,000, against the $2,981,000,000 of 1929. Thus the 1932 income of the auto-makers was not much more than onefifth of what it had been in 1929. And although the drop in auto income was caused chiefly by the drop in general purchasing power, the auto shrinkage was particularly heavy, because so many of its former sales had depended upon the psychology of the prosperity period. From the excessive loss of automobile income came the excessive mortality of automobile companies. You will remember that there were 87 exhibitors at the 1921 automobile show but only 46 at the 1930 show. Even in the prosperity period, the weaker auto units were falling off rapidly. But during the depression the smaller companies simply disappeared. Even the larger independents came out when they came out with what would appear to be a permanently impaired earning power. The auto companies were not well adapted to a long period of drastically reduced income. Their capacity for self-financing had been so great that they had not troubled much to build up capital reserves. Profits had gone into extensive plant expansion and extremely generous dividends, so that there was not much to fall back upon when the rainy day finally arrived. Even then no one could have suspected that the rain would be so heavy or that the downpour would last so long. The collapse during the 1930-32 periods and the failure of the "independents" to recover from it has basically altered the character of the automobile industry. About a dozen big steel companies went staggering through the Hoover period of the depression, but they all managed to stagger through to the arrival of comparatively better times. And they have all participated in the recovery period on about the same proportional basis that they participated in the good times. For instance, the United States Steel Corporation’s percentage of the total steel output is probably now somewhat less than it was in 1929. Thus the steel industry today is as competitive as it has been at any time since 1900, which, to be sure, is not nearly as competitive as the steel industry would like to have you think. But the monopolistic aspects of the steel industry are no more pronounced today than they were a dozen years ago. With the automobile industry, the situation is very different. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler have made more than 90 per cent of the automobiles during the past ten years. During the greater part of that period, the other companies have not been able to make any money on the other 10 per cent of the auto business, and even in their best years few of them have been able to make very much money. Now, for a while, they may extract some profit from war business, but it does not at the moment seem likely that they will ever again become major factors in the production of four-wheeled self-propelled vehicles of which gasoline is the motive power. The crystallization of the automobile industry into its present form appears to have become extremely solid.
It is an odd reflection that the steel industry, which has been subject to very marked monopolistic influences for the past forty years, is now, from the standpoint of the number of significant producers, much more competitive than the automobile industry, although the auto industry was the last refuge of competition for a good many years. In an industry so thoroughly dominated by three producers, it is impossible to prevent a decline in the competitive spirit. A hundred companies might cut one another’s throats (not that that would do any particular good), but three companies are bound to tip their hats politely when they pass each other on the street. This statement does not consider the Government’s antitrust suit, which refers only to automobile financing, and which is perhaps rather more interesting than important. And it is not meant to imply that General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler have reached any agreements, oral or written, which are contrary to the Sherman Act, the Clayton Act, or the spirit of the late Adam Smith. When only three companies are left, it is not necessary to reach any agreements; whatever seems appropriate to the situation can be performed by reliance upon instinct. And so the automobile industry has become much like all the other big industries. The development of monopolies has gone forward, with no important assistance from bankers or other persons commonly and correctly associated with the monopolistic idea. Through a process of attrition, the auto industry has reached a goal which in other industries was created or at least accelerated by a process of co-operation. In or about 1900 a new thing did come out of the West, and it remained quite remarkably a new thing for the next thirty years. But perhaps its differences from other industries were only superficial; at least its resemblance to the others is now much more pronounced. In the opinion of the writer, it is correct to describe the auto industry as capitalism’s favorite child, but perhaps that description has been used here with the feeling that the automobile industry might have accomplished something more than the other members of the family. But that the child should grow up to resemble the parents is no doubt what one should legitimately expect.
Automobile Industry The Horseless Carriage The First Automobile Race Gasoline vs. Steam and Electricity The Automobile Progresses Beginnings in Detroit The Oldsmobile The Cadillac The Buick The Ford Motor Company The Packard Motor Car Company The cars of 1900-1908 Monopoly and Merger The Selden patent General Motors The Profit Formula The Overland The Hudson The Studebaker The Ford again General Motors Again The Growth of the Industry The Concentration of the Industry The War Boom Henry Ford’s Difficulties The difficulties of General Motors America in the War After The War The First Crisis: A Bad Year The First Crisis: A Worse Year New Times, New Problems Shifts and Changes Price Reductions A Favorable Year The Golden Age The End of Model T The End of Prosperity The Vanishing Customer Receiverships Selective Recovery Labor Unions and Strikes The Industry Recovers Repetition of a Pattern
