L’industrie automobile dans un contexte d’affaires global

The car industry has witnessed major changes and these are due to a number of external forces that changed the decades old practices of manufacturing. This paper analyses important forces in the last two decades that have had a major impact on the car manufacturing practices. The paper provides statistics on the production figures of cars in various countries and analyses the external forces such as Euro Emission Standards, Outsourcing, introduction of alternate fuels and the advent of computers in the automobile industry.
Environmental issues such as air pollution, global warming and ozone layer depletion have become one of the major forces that have influenced the design and manufacturing of automobiles. Governments across the world have created regulations such as the Euro Standards and US Emission Standards that specify the maximum amount of gases such as Nitrous Oxide that is allowed in the exhaust gases of automobiles. automobile manufacturers have to comply with these regulations or risk being banned from selling their products. Automobiles also have to run on fuels such as bio diesel, natural gas and other non fossil fuels and these changes have changed the way in which automobiles are manufactured and operated.
Another important factor is the outsourcing of automobile components to the Asian countries such as China and India. These countries have skilled manpower, a high level of technical competence and low labour rates. With the advancement in sophisticated computer controlled machine tools and cemented carbide tools, workers in these countries are able to produce components of acceptable quality at high volumes and low prices and there has been a shift in manufacturing activity to these countries. This has reduced the manufacturing costs and has made automobiles more affordable.