Assembly

New Zealand's car assembly industry began with the Colonial Motor Company piecing together Ford Model Ts in the early 1920s, and the first true production line came in 1926 with General Motors. For the next 70 years, as governments imposed tariffs on importing completely built up cars, the assembly industry directly employed thousands of New Zealanders, and indirectly supported tens of thousands more. Factories assembling models from the Morris Minor to the Toyota Hilux became part of the social fabric of communities up and down the country. A highly pictorial and well researched book that indirectly provided employment to nearly 8% of the New Zealand workforce at one point in our short history, including a full epilogue of the effects of the closures over the last 23 years after the last closure.