The Origins of the Latin American Automobile Industry

Abstract

The motor industry is almost a hundred years old. Its origins can be traced back to the 1880s when Daimler and Benz in Germany put their first cars on the market. The industry has come a long way in the century which followed passing through a number of distinct phases. An initial experimental period in the last years of the past century and the first years of the present, in which the German industry played a crucial role, gave way to an age of mass production initiated in the United States by Ford, with the introduction of the Model T in 1908. This revolutionized the motor industry, first in the United States and then in the rest of the world. It established that the car would not only be the plaything of the rich (at least in the advanced industrialized countries) but could become a mass consumption good. It also extended a particular form of the labour process based on the fragmentation of tasks, the de-skilling of labour and the use of the conveyor belt which has come to be known as Fordism. Finally, in the international context, the Model T was the first truly international car, produced in a number of countries and sold world-wide. The inter-war period was dominated by the US industry, but also saw the development of a protected industry in Western Europe. After the Second World War the US industry was increasingly challenged first by the Europeans and then by the Japanese.