The line graph illustrates the number of hours required to produce a vehicle at four US-based car manufacturers – Nissan, Daimler Chrysler (DC), General Motors (GM) and Ford – between 1998 and 2002.
Overall, three of the four car manufacturers experienced a fall in production times over the period in question, while Ford was the only one to record an opposite trend. Nissan’s decline was by far the most dramatic, fell from the highest figure in 1998 to the lowest by the end of the period.
Focusing first on Nissan and Ford, whose trajectories were completely different, Nissan came in at about 37 hours in 1998 – the highest figure in the graph – before plunging dramatically to around 28 in 1999, after which it continued easing gradually from 24 in 2000 to just under 22 in 2002. Ford followed the opposite path: starting from the lowest point in 1998 at 25 hours, it held steady for a year before climbing gradually to a peak of 27 hours in 2001, then easing slightly to 26 by 2002.
Turning to DC and GM, both saw a steadier downward trend. DC began at 32 hours in 1998 and it stayed more or less unchanged in the next three years and declined significantly to 28 hours in the final year. Despite Nissan’s dominance in 1998, it was enough to make DC the highest-ranked manufacturer by the end. GM, meanwhile, declined gradually and consistently throughout, from 32 hours in 1998 to 24 hours in 2002. By 2002, all four manufacturers’ production times had converged within a relatively narrow range of 21 to 28.