People’s cars and People’s Technologies: Skoda and Fiat Experts face the American Challenge (1918-1948),

Beginning in the 1910s, Europeans began to believe that on the other side of the Atlantic an extraordinarily efficient production model had been developed. Mass production and scientific management were the keywords denoting the concepts that distinguished this model from all other produc-tion paradigms in use on the Old Continent. The United States thus became the model for a growing number of European industries. Yet, there is a growing literature indicating that until World filar II awareness of American production methods did not result in the spread of mass production and scientific management techniques in European facto-ries It was only after the war, when it seemed that American industry might become overpowering, that European managers and entrepreneurs tried to rnake up for lost time in narrowing the gap with the United States. Technical personnel once more began to travel overseas with the clear intention of transporting the American one best way back to their respective countries