ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an injunction from corporate management and with some history of the organisation of manufacturing to date. It focuses on the minds of du Pont and Sloan when the marketing strategy was first articulated. The chapter analyses the history of automobile production methods from the earliest days of Ford through Ford's initial perfection of mass production. It sketches the history of industrial organisation in automobiles through GM's moment of innovation in the mid-1920, that is, the competitive setting. The chapter explains how mass production came to General Motors. The interwar years were a period in which the industry's evolution took a decisive turn. It is well known that the production and assembly of automobiles in the early years of the American industry proceeded through essentially craft methods. Annual model changes were not new to the American automobile industry in the mid-1920s.
