This book describes the turbulent thirty-year history of the auto industry, while illustrating its important phases from a cross-sectional and a bird's-eye view. The auto industry has globalized rapidly in the past three decades, but now we have reached a time of world financial crisis. General Motors (GM) reigned as the world's top producer in the auto industry for seventy years, yet now has gone through bankruptcy restructuring. Nobody expected such a dramatic change. However, thirty years ago, nobody could have guessed that this would be a global industry and would be significantly linked with the fate of our new civilization at the beginning of the twenty-first century. A quarter of a century ago, in other words before the end of the 1970s, the automotive industry was only a local or regional industry which was independently established, although it was already an industry that represented regions and nations, particularly in the advanced countries. Certainly, no one expected that this industry would develop in Asian countries to such an extent that South Korea, China, and India would become countries which annually produce 3.3 million, 10 million, and 3 million cars respectively. Of course, even during this period, there were multinational companies in the industry, such as the US's Big Three, which produced cars in the US and Europe. But there was almost no business affiliation between these two areas.