Wrong Forecasts and Unexpected Changes: the World that Changed the Machine

Since the 1990s, there has been an almost unprecedented proliferation and succession of forecasts and recommendations that automobile firms are supposed to take into account if they wish to survive and/or maintain their independence over the short term. The list is long: lean production, globalisation, cost-cutting, ‘new economy’, externalisation, modularisation, concentration, commonalisation, innovation, delocalisation, global sourcing, etc. At the same time, many developments and options have been underestimated and sometimes even ignored, despite the fact that the automobile world which they depict is very much at odds with the idea of a global convergence in strategies and practices: heterogeneous demands and markets; emergence of new carmakers; serious problems facing manufacturers that have long been at the top of the pile; the hiccups faced by some of the emerging countries and very rapid take-off of continent-sized countries; confirmation of a divergence in national automobile policies; skyrocketing petrol and raw material prices; increasingly stringent environmental standards; accelerated transition to alternative driving systems; the world financial crisis, etc. Moreover, it seems that some of these changes have paved the way for what might be called a ‘second automobile revolution’. The real questions are why so many forecasts have been wrong; whether current changes were foreseeable; and how to develop more reliable scenarios. A few initial responses can be found in some of GERPISA’s earlier studies.