Читать книгу Story of the automobile - H. L. Barber - Страница 6

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Weight decreased, as the engineers had planned, and the average price of cars decreased in one year from $671 to $605. In the eight previous years the average price of automobiles had dropped from $2,125 to $814. Wall Street, which once had only the cold shoulder for the automobile producer, took a permanent seat at the table where daily the industry was dissected, analyzed, weighed, discussed and reviewed; and, as a result, it is as difficult to keep from the financial eyes of Wall Street the operations of the great automobile factories as it would be to hide the clearing house reports. The keenest financial and commercial experts of the United States have learned to keep the motor car industry constantly under surveillance—not that they mistrust the manufacturers, but that they have found the industrial situation is so firmly linked to the dollars and cents program of the country’s economy that nothing may successfully act to deprecate the importance of the auto industry. Time was when General Motors sold as low as 40—what Stock Exchange expert would expect to see this stock sell for less than 105?—and if conditions were to become so chaotic that General Motors, with its prosperous units, were to break to a point or two under par, what financial student would not search for something akin to a Black Friday?

Immutable laws work in the automobile industry. The maker daily takes a course in the University of Production, because an army of selling factors constantly is attending to the absorption facilities of the country’s markets and he rarely permits himself the task of figuring on the “probable saturation point.” It is a wonderfully important thing to the maker that the national Organization gets official reports, guides the policies of standardization, holds an indefinable influence over the engineers of the industry, and sits as the congress of the Republic of Motor Car Production. The auto industry of today is, perhaps, the most intricate thing in the country, and yet so responsive to the law of supply and demand that there is not an element of guesswork in it.

Although more than two hundred automobile concerns that had entered the arena of business, developing from the “blue print stage” to manufacturing concerns of considerable output, had failed in the last twelve years, the automobile industry had been a big paying one. Pioneers who remain and whose works annually pay dividends, accepted the failures as the necessary concomitant of a great business that only showed an output of 3,700 cars in 1899 and only 11,000 vehicles in 1903, the amount growing to 485,000 cars in the year 1913.

“Our house is a generally well ordered one,” the maker delighted in saying. “The industry is like a science. The engineer has brought standardization to almost finality, the matter of styles and body designs is an exact science, the tire companies have been keen rivals but beneath their terrific competition they have permitted the stream of co-operation in tire standardization to run smoothly, and the manufacturer has spent his money wisely in equipping his plant with plenty of large-quantity type of machinery and increased his plant to enable him to handle the large production. Increased production in economically managed plants spells the maximum of profit.”