Road King Trucks
Introduction You have recently been hired as the CEO of Road King Trucks, Inc. Road King Trucks Inc. is a California-based truck manufacturing company. The company is well known for manufacturing large, heavy-duty trucks at a reasonable cost. One of its greatest achievements is that its trucks can be easily modified or customized for different applications. Road King Trucks also builds school buses. The company is considering an expansion of its current product line to include transit buses. You feel that due to high gasoline prices, commuters will be more willing to consider using mass transit instead of using their cars to commute to work. Company Profile Road King Trucks, Inc. was established by the Smith brothers in 1880 as the California Wagon Company. The firm started manufacturing horse-drawn wagons to serve the growing population in California. The brothers quickly realized that the times were changing, so they started looking for the technologies that would keep them at the forefront of their field of business. In 1915, the Smith brothers decided that they needed to make trucks as replacements for the wagons, because trucks were starting to serve the same uses as wagons, and the wagon industry was not going to be viable in the longer term. The company started making school buses in the early 1940s. Most manufacturers had been commissioned by the government to produce different large vehicles to support World War II operations. Road King Trucks opted to produce buses. It was an easy decision to make, since the buses would use common parts with the companys trucks, and the customers were local governments. Starting in the 1950s, the school bus business accounted for about 50 of Road King Trucks revenues. The Transit Bus Opportunity You arranged a meeting with the firms top management, as well as the chief design and manufacturing engineers to propose his new product. You presented an argument that more individuals in the United States and