Manufacturing costs are one of the main tools that firms have still some control to compete in the market. Today,
there is a debate about the usefulness of standard costing in today’s manufacturing environment (Drury, 1999;
Hilton, 2001; Joshi, 2001; Kaygusuz, 2006a). The justification of this claim is that standard costing does not
meet the needs of business because of the introduction of advanced manufacturing technologies (AMT, JIT,
TQC), shorter product life cycles, decreasing emphasis of labour cost in the total production costs, and intense
global competition. However, the literature suggests that standard costing continues to be used. The aim of this
article is to investigate whether the standard costing is still widely used in the automotive industry which has the
biggest export sector in Turkey