The Strategy for Growth and Economic Development in the Us Auto Industry

The Strategy for Growth and Economic Development in the US Auto Industry

      The automotive industry is the largest manufacturing industry in the United States. There is no other single industry linked to as much of U.S. manufacturing or generates as much retail business and employment as the US Auto Industry. America’s complicated love affair with the automobile has done well for over the past centuries. The automobile’s impact on the American society and cultural mores remain so pervasive that there are few other products that can stake the same claim. Few, if any, other products have been so enshrined in this nation’s movies, clothing, dance, music and in the general American psyche as much as the automobile. The media has produced exhortations which depicts Americans in various automobiles such as the Chevrolet, Oldsmobile, while people across America rife with poems, lyrics and advertisements of Mustang Sally, Pink Cadillac, the Little Old Lady from Pasadena’s Dodge, the Beach Boys’ T-Bird, the Little GTO, Maybelline and the Ford V-8 truck along with the wealthy pleading for a Mercedes Benz and Porsche (Flint, 1987). Consequently, a connection to the automobile has been drawn from almost every level of an American’s life. Even when one pairs two seemingly unrelated topics, automobiles and international geopolitics, a connection is formed with a movement to reduce America’s dependence on oil by encouraging the use of automobiles with greater fuel efficiencies and the pursuit of alternate fuel sources. Similarly, automobiles have been reviled, celebrated, nearly worshipped, and sometimes banned, used relentlessly and relied on almost entirely for most of our every day transportation needs.   Additionally many Americans, particularly those living in areas with limited public transportation, and the lack of an automobile almost diminishes their prospects for earning a livelihood.   For almost a century since Henry Ford established the Ford Motor Company in 1903...