The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

parts we practically took for granted that they all had to be made in the one 
factory—that there was some special virtue in having a single roof over the 
manufacture of the entire car. We have now developed away from this. If we 
build any more large factories, it will be only because the making of a single 
part must be in such tremendous volume as to require a large unit. I hope 
that in the course of time the big Highland Park plant will be doing only 
one or two things. The casting has already been taken away from it and has 
gone to the River Rouge plant. So now we are on our way back to where we 
started from—excepting that, instead of buying our parts on the outside, we 
are beginning to make them in our own factories on the outside.
This is a development which holds exceptional consequences, for it 
means, as I shall enlarge in a later chapter, that highly standardized, highly 

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68  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
subdivided industry need no longer become concentrated in large plants 
with all the inconveniences of transportation and housing that hamper 
large plants. A thousand or five hundred men ought to be enough in a single 
factory; then there would be no problem of transporting them to work or 
away from work and there would be no slums or any of the other unnatural 
ways of living incident to the overcrowding that must take place if the work-
men are to live within reasonable distances of a very large plant.
Highland Park now has five hundred departments. Down at our Piquette 
plant we had only eighteen departments, and formerly at Highland Park we 
had only one hundred and fifty departments. This illustrates how far we are 
going in the manufacture of parts.