Introduction: In Search of a Viable Automobile Space

The late twentieth century was marked by a host of strategic challenges associated with a new phase in the internationalization of the world’s economies, a phenomenon commonly referred to as ‘globalization’. The automobile industry found itself at the very heart of these events, mainly because of the strategies being pursued by the firms in this sector, notably automakers trying (with a greater or lesser degree of success) to implement various internationalization strategies. GERPISA has published two collective volumes that study these strategies in great detail (Freyssenet, Shimizu and Volpato, 2003a, b). These volumes highlight the problems facing those firms that have been the most committed to so-called ‘world car’ or ‘global platform’ strategies that presuppose at least a partial convergence and homogenization of markets. Since the early 1990s, Ford, with its world car (the CDW27 platform/Mondeo in Europe) and the aborted merger between its European and North American entities (the ‘Ford 2000’ plan) plus Fiat, with its world car targeting the emerging countries (the 178/Palio project), acted as the standard bearers for this kind of strategy. By the early twenty- first century both Ford and Fiat are suffering from the after-effects of their strategic miscalculations.