Comment by mcswell

I wonder whether the reason carriage making was viable on the small scale is that there weren't any (many? Studebaker was an exception) large carriage makers. Had Henry Ford's assembly line technology been applied earlier to making carriages, would all of those small carriage makers have been put out of business sooner?

Of course the other part of this is distribution. If you had a large carriage factory in Ohio, could you have profitably shipped your product to Kansas? Or would a small Kansas carriage maker have undercut you? Seen in this way, part of the reason for the success of a few large auto makers might have been the more or less simultaneous rise of the means of transporting large products by railroad.