General Motors is investing $230 million in four factories that will help produce the Chevrolet Volt and Cruze, two cars absolutely vital to its “reinvention” as a leaner, greener company building smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles.
The four factories in Flint, Michigan, will employ more than 500 people. They will produce the engines, body panels and automated machinery needed to build the automobiles, which hit the market next year. “These four GM manufacturing plants have a key role in GM’s production of the next-generation of fuel-efficient vehicles,” manufacturing manager Larry Zahner said in a statement.
One of the plants, Flint Engine South, is being retooled — at a cost of $202 million — to build the 1.4-liter engine generator for the Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric vehicle and the 1.4-liter turbocharged engine for Chevrolet Cruze compact. GM had long planned to build the engines in Flint but had to scrap that plan in December when its bankruptcy became imminent. But with things starting to look up at General Motors after emerging from bankruptcy in July, the plan is back on track.
GM says the Flint plant will produce 40 engines per day when it comes online next year. That will ramp up to 800 per day by the fall, when the Volt is slated to see production. Reuters says the “first batch” of engines slated for the Volt — which goes into production next fall — will come from a GM factory in Austria until Flint Engine South is up to speed.
General Motors also will spend $1.7 million refurbishing press lines at the Flint Metal Center that will produce body panels for the Volt. Another $30 million will be spent on the Grand Blanc Weld Tool Center, which will build the robotic welders that will assemble Volt and Cruze bodies. The rest of the cash is slated for the Flint Tool and Die operation that will build and test dies needed to build the Volt.
The last of the pre-production Volt prototypes — cars that look, run and drive just like the production cars — rolled out of GM’s technical center in Warren, Michigan, on Friday. “This is our shining moment after all we’ve been through with the bankruptcy this year,” Andy Pawlaczyk, chairman of UAW Local 160, told the Detroit Free Press. General Motors has been using the 74 prototypes, called integration vehicles, for testing and to prepare the Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant for production. The testing included a run to the summit of Pike’s Peak.
Still no official word on what the Volt will cost, but the unofficial “I want one list” our friend Lyle Dennis is keeping over at GM-Volt.com has topped 50,000.
GM Gears Up for Volt Production With $230M Investment | Autopia | Wired.com