The NSU Vehicle Works in Neckarsulm, north of Stuttgart, grew into the world’s largest motorcycle maker by unit output in 1938/9. Its boss Fritz von Falkenhayn later boasted how his principled reorganization efforts had rescued the company from the depths of the Great Depression. Ditching car construction, focusing on motorcycles, and boosting the brand through sporting successes indeed seemed the main pillars of NSU’s resurgence. But those were no original ideas.
Italian motor vehicle giant Fiat had looked to expand in the German market in the late 1920s. In NSU, it found a financially vulnerable launching pad. Together with the Dresdner Bank, Turin took over the Neckarsulm business in 1928. The following years saw large amounts of restructuring that sources from both Fiat and the Dresdner recount in some detail. Despite soon having to adjust to an ever-deepening economic collapse, Fiat had clear ideas about the direction of the motor vehicles markets in Germany and Italy – and it set the table for von Falkenhayn.
My paper uses the business history of NSU, which makes up a larger project, to trace converging or diverging ideas of automotive futures as well as two and four-wheeled vehicle markets. How did Italian and German ideas about how to sell the most cars and motorcycles at the greatest profit in countries of relatively low purchasing power differ? What similarities did engineers and managers in Neckarsulm and Turin see, and how did transnational exchanges inform and co-create business opportunities? And what importance, not least, was assigned to the ideological subscriptions that fascist regimes in both countries made to ‘popular motorization’? I argue that joint plans of a German-Italian motor vehicle market were based on sound assessments, failed to anticipate the export restrictions of the Nazi government, yet ultimately continued through three starkly different political regimes.