The Modern Auto Industry

By 1980, more than 300 million cars and 85 million trucks and buses were operating throughout the world, forming an indispensable transportation network. In the United States, automobile registrations stood at about 114 million, with 30 million commercial vehicles in operation. Germany's Volkswagen sent its first shipments of autos, popularly known as Beetles, to the United States in the early 1950s and eventually became a major force in the U.S. auto industry, opening a U.S. assembly plant in Pennsylvania in 1978 and planning another for Michigan for 1983. British and French automakers also enjoyed growth in exports to the United States during the 1950s. In 1959 the French shipped in a record 187,000 units and the British a record 208,000 units. In that year, U.S. auto manufacturers introduced their first lines of small “compact” cars to compete with imports, and initially they were successful. In later years, however, size and weight were added to these models, once again leaving the smallest-size market to exporters, notably the Japanese.

The first Japanese imports to the United States—16 compact pickups—arrived in 1956. Ten years later Japanese vehicle imports reached 65,000 units. By 1980, the Japanese claimed 2.1 million sales in the United States. The Japanese firm Honda built an assembly plant in Ohio that began production in 1982, and another Japanese firm, Nissan, constructed a plant in Tennessee that began producing compact pickup trucks in 1983.

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