The automobile industry is one of the biggest industrial sectors in the world. If one includes the economic activities up- and downstream of actual manufacturing the sector’s global value added stands at around 5–10 per cent. Worldwide there are around 500 million registered passenger cars. Their number continues to grow and by 2030 this will triple (Bartel et al. 2015: 6). Automobile manufacturing has undergone numerous rapid upheavals during the over 100 years of its existence. The major ruptures have been marked by shifts in production and demand and technological inventions and innovations in production methods. Within a few years of the end of the Second World War the automobile had grown to become the most important mass consumption good, assumed the role of a status symbol in
blue-collar households and supplanted bicycles, motorcycles and trams – a process sometimes aided and abetted by automobile manufacturers, such as General Motors2 – and finally also rail transport as the main means of mass transportation.