Category: North America

The automotive industry is dependent on the supplier industry on the one hand and the sales markets on the other, so the question of location is of central importance. While the American automotive industry is strongly oriented towards the traditional locations in the “Manufacturing Belt”, especially in the greater Detroit area, the advance of the Japanese, German and Korean automotive groups in particular shows a strong concentration on the southeastern United States. American companies only have individual locations there and in the Midwest. The reasons for these different distribution patterns are divergent company decisions and market development philosophies as well as the change in importance of location factors.

TO THE TRADITIONAL LOCATION PATTERNS OF AMERICAN COMPANIES
In the American automotive industry, transport-oriented decisions regarding raw materials, supplying industries and sales markets have always been decisive, especially since the beginning of mass production. While the first ten years of the American automotive industry were characterized by many small plants in the northeast, mass production began after the founding of Ford (1903) and General Motors (1908) with assembly line production. In 1929 there were already 4.5 million. Cars Made in the USA; this resulted in a ratio of 190 cars per 1000 residents, which in Western Europe was only reached in the late 1960s. The mass production and mass ownership of the automobile initially led to a distribution of production to the major metropolitan areas of the USA. During this time, the “Big Three” emerged from the Detroit area as market leaders because they differentiated their products and presented new models every year at a consistently low price level. They also invested heavily in advertising and had large dealer networks. This explains the extraordinary concentration of the locations in the greater Detroit area before 1945; after the Second World War, new locations were added in the Midwest and on the northeast coast.

With the imports of inexpensive small cars from Europe and Japan, the need for rationalization increased from the mid-1960s. The American automobile groups developed their own “compacts”, handy and inexpensive small cars that were preferably used as second cars. These rationalizations also led to plant closings or the switch to truck production. However, new American production facilities for compacts also opened. These works were preferably built on railway lines with good transport links, five to ten “kilometers away from the nearest highway or within a radius of 50 to 75” kilometers from the nearest airport with international connections. The supply industry, however, continued to concentrate on the Great Lakes area. For more information about the continent of North America, please check naturegnosis.com.