The Machine That Changed the World

The automobile industry has grown tremendously since the early days of the “horseless carriage,” first patented by Karl Benz in 1886.

There’s good reason the automobile industry is often called the “industry of industries.” In 2014 alone, some 90 million cars and commercial vehicles were produced. The automobile industry as a whole represents the world’s largest manufacturing activity. Let’s look at how this came to be.

In its early days, the auto industry was defined by craft production, meaning that highly skilled engineers and manufacturers tailored each individual car to a customer’s taste. This was slow and expensive, thus few people could afford cars – and only some 1,000 vehicles were produced yearly.

Only luxury cars are produced via craft production today. In general, the industry has moved to mass production. Inspired by Henry Ford, this change came about at the end of the twentieth century.

Henry Ford simply sought to produce more cars in less time. He realized he could achieve this by designing cars with the same, interchangeable parts and producing the parts separately, instead of working on a whole car at once.

The development of the assembly line further accelerated the manufacturing process. An early assembly line was a moving belt with workers stationed at different spots along it; each worker performed one or two simple tasks, over and over again. These basic tasks didn’t require highly specialized skills, and in fact, many assembly-line workers were immigrants who spoke little English.

The automatization of the production process meant that cars were no longer customized (or were customized very little), but instead offered a great advantage: any person could drive or even repair them, just by following a standard 150-page manual!