hopefully life-long relationship is created between the company, the dealer, and the buyer. Since the company keeps ties to its consumers, it already knows what the consumer wants, and the consumer is more willing to buy from the company. Toyota continues developing and producing its car, and it comes across the same problem as the GM team of not having all the specialized parts it needs. Like with the dealerships, Toyota has formed many symbiotic relationships with car part suppliers. These suppliers work hand in hand, with the Toyota team and develop any products that Toyota needs for its new model. The past decade has seen many interesting fluctuations within the automobile industry. Overall the auto industry fluctuates with the normal business cycle, for motor vehicles are an elastic demand to consumers. The more the price for cars goes up, the less people buy cars. For many years, the automobile industry has seen very large profits because the demand and necessity for cars has increased significantly. Recently, large foreign competitors and steadily increasing prices in motor vehicles have reduced these surplus profits within the industry. Consumers are now demanding lower prices and more luxuries in their cars. To deal with this consumer demand, auto manufacturers have begun by lowering employee pay rolls, replacing employees with machines and more capable workers to improve productivity, and many times merge with other companies to better compete in the market. Production growth has been about 2-3 percent for the past few years in the auto industry, and hopefully will continue by implementing new cost efficient procedures. American industries, competing in the international markets, face the problem of a strong dollar compared to the weaker currencies of foreign nations. This means that American cars to foreign nations are more expensive, and foreign cars to Americans are cheaper. This supply and demand problem was solved by the...
