Most of us forget how innovative the car companies were at one point in
time. It wasn't always the SUVs and the gas-guzzlers. There was a time
when the auto industry was a beacon of innovation, where the best and
the brightest went to apply cutting edge ideas. The
New York Times suggests in a piece that the Detroit car can save itself by getting back to the industry's innovative roots.
Excerpt:
History and technology suggest that there may be — provided, of
course, that the Big 3 can survive the next few years. And that’s a big
if. The hopeful path, auto and labor experts say, requires rethinking
not just old-line management and work practices but also how cars are
sold, serviced and powered — that is, reinventing the industry and the
car itself.
Such a shift would mark a return, in a sense, to the
industry’s innovative roots. After all, there were more than 3,000
automobile start-ups in American from 1900 to 1925, turning out autos
of every imaginable design, variously powered by steam, electricity and
then gasoline. Some had six wheels, others had shiplike tillers for
steering. Detroit was the Silicon Valley of its day.
“The auto
industry did so much to create 20th-century America, and how we handle
this crisis that the industry is facing now could have a very large
influence on 21st-century America,” observed
Douglas Brinkley, a historian at
Rice University and author of
“Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company and a Century of Progress” (Penguin, 2003).
Read the entire article
here.
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