This book addresses the future of the automobile and the auto industry in the face of environmental and safety challenges, energy constraints and competitive imbalance among the major auto-producing nations. It covers the industry at the firm level and at the global level. It projects the composition of the industry twenty years hence, estimates long-term demand for the product, focuses on on the growing cooperation between producers on individual models even as overall competition in the industry intensifies, and reveals two alternative paths for industrial relations. It examines how labour, management and government in the key auto-producing nations can walk a tightrope between totally open trade, which would be politically unacceptable for many western auto industries, and rigid protectionism.
Abstract