“The future is going to begin in the next two to three years”, declared Chrysler’s long-time manufacturing technology specialist Frank J. Ewasyshyn in 2009.
We know the world is changing, and the auto industry is transforming along with it. Or is it the other way around?
It all started when Ransom Eli Olds started mass-producing the ‘curved dash’ Olds in 1902. Smaller objects had been produced in large quantities before, but the horseless carriage was the first big thing since the proverbial sliced bread.
Just as Horch changed his company name to Audi, the Latin version of his name, so did Olds use his initials to form REO in 1904. Both automobile pioneers had better ideas than their financiers would allow them to introduce; REO trucks were produced until 1975. Olds also established subsidiary companies to assure supplies: the Michigan Screw Company, Atlas Drop Forge and others.
Henry Ford went one better than Olds when he expanded mass production by using the first conveyor-belt based assembly line in 1914. Ford gave meaning to the term ‘alternative transportation’ by taking travelers out of the buggy and putting them into the Model T. Henry assured his supplies by having his own rubber plantations in South America, his own ore mines, smelters, foundries and so on.
As well, the Ford Motor Company expanded into Canada and other countries in the early years of the last century.
Over time the automobile grew more and more complex. Individually owned companies specializing in various component parts sprang up, better able to utilize the latest developments in manufacturing technology and material science. As many car companies grew ever more powerful during the second half of the last century, many of these private firms fell under control and ownership of the auto giants.
Administrators, no matter how diversified, can only grapple with so many facets of modern business. Various organizational techniques were tried and failed. Supply companies were sold, others bought. The integration of computers in management, development, manufacturing and distribution may have hidden the underlying and overlying problems of the recent major mayhem.
Who is to blame for NOT feeding information to the artificial intelligence of super-computers to predict the oil crisis, the pollution problems, acid rain, the oil war, the 2008 oil and fuel price spike or the 2010 Golf gusher? Who suspected that highly publicized turbines or rotary Wankel engines would NOT be driving all of today’s automobiles? Who foresaw the changes in customer preference?
All this influenced the buying public and the vehicles rolling off assembly lines, whether they are used to drive to the co-op or the local village store, commute east or west on the 401 or see Canada along the ‘Trans Canada’ on your vacation.
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