Evolution Interrupted

The evolution of mass production methods in the European automobile industries was an interrupted rather than a linear one. Although Europeans invented the automobile and dominated the industrys early history, U.S. automakers took the lead by the First World War and held it for 60 years. Buffered by cultural preferences and government protection, European automobile industries drew only in part from the system of automobile manufacture worked out in the course of two revolutions (and attendant purges of low performance firms) in the United States. But European automakers failed to develop an internally consistent method of making and selling cars. They were consequently inefficient and out of step with the external shocks that reinforced U.S. innovations. The eclectic charter of European operations that obtained between the world wars was neither here nor there; European automakers could neither compete on the American terms of price or model variety nor did they conceive an alternative basis of competitive advantage. When they eventually cleaved to the U.S. model in the wake of the Second World War, they failed to appreciate the rigidities inherent therein that rendered them vulnerable to a new system evolving at the same time in Japan.