The organization of the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers was followed by that of the co-operative Association of Licensed Automobile Owners, organized to resist the tightening of the clasp of the licensor of the Selden patent rights, and by the Society of Automobile Engineers, and still later by the American Motor Car Manufacturers Association. The Automobile Board of Trade followed, and today the trade association is the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce. Fostering trade, reforming abuses and promoting harmony, were steadily the aims of all the organizations, and how well they have done it is attested by the fact that no association of producers has better demonstrated and more completely justified the valuable principle of true co-operation.
Standardization in the automobile business has never discouraged individuality of the manufacturers in the essentials of form or speed. It was confined to those directions where appearance was not important. It never extended to bodies, stream lines or designs that would deprive a manufacturer of distinctions and selling points.
It is standardization of detail—uniformity of screws, locks, washers, spring and bearing parts, water connections, etc. Co-operation has been practiced intelligently, and the result has been that standardization favored economical manufacturing by creating a large demand, calling for quantities that fostered specialization in parts by manufacturers, with resulting low cost to the automobile maker. It also left him free to center his efforts, energy and capital on production in quantity, and himself get down the price of the finished automobile.
To the thinker, one of the most interesting features of the automobile industry is this example it has given to the world of efficiency and co-operation. We are not surprised at efficiency in the steel business or the oil business, because they are industries conducted practically by one man power; and if autocratic rule is not efficient, its last excuse for being might appear to have ceased to exist; but to find several hundred different manufacturers with divergent ambitions, ideals and interests benevolently engaged in co-operative competition, justifies, it would seem, that optimism which sees the world as growing better.
Certainly if “by their works ye shall know them,” the progress made by the automobile industry in the short space of time it has played the star part on the industrial stage, has been the most splendid demonstration of the value in commercial industrialism of the tolerant, broad minded type of co-operation, coupled with efficiency. It is an example of the value of harmonious co-ordination of the differing efforts of man in advancing the material progress of the world, and in the case of the automobile industry, the best assurance of its continued advance as the moving force in the production of one of the greatest and most beneficial forms, not alone of transportation, but of mind culture, of healthful relaxation and of sane recreation.
CHAPTER IV.
AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY AS AN INVESTMENT.
A dozen years ago dictionary publishers vied with one another to be the first to announce that new editions of their wordbooks contained the word “automobile.”
Today the automobile industry is the fourth in magnitude—only three others that are larger.
Is your imagination equal to the task of forming a vivid picture of the tremendous activity that has been maintained to produce such results in so short a time?
Do you know of any other industry in which money could have been at work in as great a creative capacity? We will not say in a capacity to produce immediate profits, because so far the automobile industry has been largely in the building, in the creative state.