Philip Scranton, Rutgers University
"The Auto Parts Maze in the US and the USSR, 1946-1980"
This is a chapter of Prof. Scranton's book manuscript Spare Parts: A Global History of a Modern Problem, forthcoming from Johns Hopkins in 2026.
Abstract:
Thousands of academic and trade books have analyzed the automobile industry, supplemented by millions of journal and magazine pages covering day-to-day production and marketing. The literature on vehicle maintenance and repair is far thinner (see Vinsel & Russell, The Innovation Delusion; Borg, Auto Mechanics), while studies of the essential technologies – spare parts – are few indeed. Our fascination with production and consumption has left what links the two – distribution – largely uninvestigated. Whereas auto assembly trended strongly toward corporate consolidation, parts provision resisted the Big Three’s sustained efforts at control, persisted as a source of technical novelty, and remained chaotic and bitterly competitive throughout the postwar decades. Parts profusion accelerated during the 1960s, rising in eight years from 472,000 distinct components for Detroit models to 768,000. The perils of such abundance included long delays in locating the correct spare and the fragmentation of auto servicing into rival clusters of garages, dealerships, mass merchandisers (Sears), specialized chains (Midas), parts wholesalers (NAPA) and retailers (Auto Zone), supplemented by “shade tree mechanics” and DIY economizers. By contrast, the closing section highlights the perils of planning, Soviet-style, which yielded shortages of many components and surpluses of others (especially those that were easy-to-make, whether needed or not). Both “systems” worked, after a fashion, though neither was rational, efficient, or at all systematic.
