The 1984 MIT Press book that preceded and directly led to the mit-imvp study. Co-authored by Alan Altshuler, Martin Anderson, daniel-t-jones, daniel-roos, and james-p-womack, this was the report of MIT's International Automobile Program — the precursor to the International Motor Vehicle Program that produced machine-that-changed-the-world.
Significance
This book is the earliest major collaboration between Womack, Jones, and Roos — the same trio who would co-author the Machine six years later. It establishes their working relationship and their shared focus on the global automotive industry. Business Week cited it as one of 1984's ten best books on business and economics.
Context
In 1979, MIT initiated a study of the future of the automobile in response to the second energy shock of the decade, concerns about fuel supplies, atmospheric pollution, and safety. The study assembled an international committee of researchers and industry experts from Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Content
The book covers the automobile industry at both the firm level and the global level. It projects the composition of the industry twenty years hence, estimates long-term demand, focuses on the growing cooperation between producers on individual models even as overall competition intensifies, and examines alternative paths for industrial relations.
Relationship to the IMVP
This study was the direct precursor to the mit-imvp. The International Automobile Program established the research infrastructure, international research network, and comparative methodology that the IMVP would inherit and expand. The IMVP (launched c. 1985, see imvp-launch) deepened the automotive research with a specific focus on production methods — the dimension that would reveal Toyota's systematic superiority and lead to the naming of lean-production.
The book predates and does not use the term "lean." The discovery of TPS's significance came during the IMVP research that followed. But the Future of the Automobile established the research question (why do national automotive industries perform differently?) that the IMVP answered (because Toyota developed a fundamentally different production system).
The Five Authors
The authorship is notable: Alan Altshuler and Martin Anderson were the senior MIT researchers who initiated the program. Jones, Roos, and Womack were the younger researchers who would carry the work forward into the IMVP and become the lean movement's founding authors. The transition from five authors (1984) to three (1990, Machine) to two (1996, lean-thinking) tracks the narrowing of the research program into the Womack-Jones intellectual partnership that defined Lean.