Corporate Strategies of Automotive Manufacturers. Volume II: A Comprehensive Summary of Likely Actions by Domestic Companies Under Fuel-Economy Regulations: 1978-1985

摘要

The study is centered on helping NHTSA reach an understanding of the likely strategic actions that will be taken by automotive manufacturers in the presence of legislation and regulation designed to achieve improvement in automotive fuel economy. Many factors in addition to the fuel-economy standards are at play that will affect the strategies of the automotive manufacturers. These other factors include economic conditions in the United States, demographic shifts, changing social attitudes, and other forms of legislation (e.g., emission and safety standards) directed at the design and use of automobiles in the United States. The socioeconomic scenario portrayed is a composite based upon long-term forecasts of economic growth. An industrial dynamics model was used to project total demand for automobiles. Also, a model was constructed to simulate consumer response to the various automotive companies. That model was based upon historical factor analysis of new-car purchases and was used to project market shares of each company. Another model was built and used to estimate the strategies each company would choose for meeting the fuel-economy standard. Results of all of these efforts then were used for a financial analysis of the firms, which resulted in the projections shown here of the financial indicators for each of the automotive companies.