A recent story in yesterday’s Automotive News alerted us to GM’s plan to close the Brownstown Battery Assembly Plant in Detroit when its lease is up next summer.
That plant has a special purpose for Corvette owners as its where GM employees build the batteries and the electric drive units for the Corvette ZR1X and Grand Sport X models.
In addition to the hybrid components for Corvette, the 480,000 square-feet facility was also where batteries were made for the Cadillac Celestiq. A section of 80,000 square feet also served as the headquarters for a GM-Honda joint venture on hydrogen fuel cell development. However, that partnership has since been dissolved.
We reached out to our contacts at Chevrolet, and they have confirmed that the electric drive units for the ZR1X and Grand Sport X will be moving to GM Rochester Operations in Rochester, NY. The battery manufacturing will move to the Factory ZERO facility in Detroit.
The Brownstown Battery Assembly Plant opened in 2009, and Automotive News says staffing levels hit 300 employees at its peak but has since fallen to less than a dozen employees after GM reduced its EV development due to weak demand.
Source:
Automotive News
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Manufacturing moving to Rochester and Detroit………………and China and/or Mexico
Weak demand=no more government handouts.
I eagerly await to see how this development will be another detriment to the production and throughput for eAWD on the C8. I’m not even sure I can count the mis-deeds on 1 hand anymore.
GM is a oost-driven, soulless manufacturer of widgets. GM management believes all GM manufacturing staff are trained ‘bots who can perform any manufacturing assembly equally well with GM management oversight. And so, after 3 years of manufacturing the ERay eAWD hybrid propulsion system in Brownstown; GM is going to move the manufacturing of the eAWD system to a plant hundreds of miles away to get (lower-cost?) employees of another plant who will perform the manufacturing and assembly of the ZR1-X and GS-X equally as well as the Brownstown Battery Plant staff. Number of Brownstown manufacturing employees offered transfer to the new Rochester plant?… probably zero. I wish manufacturing prowess was so easily transferred, but with the hard lesson of the C6-Z06 grenading motor experienced by me; I scoured the forums looking for problems with this brave new world of ERay AWD hybrid systems during their 3 years in production in Brownstown….crickets! GM got it right with the ERay AWD hybrid system. And so I took delivery of my 2026 Eray in August, and less than 2 months later, with over 2100 miles on my ERay odometer, performing flawlessly, I am calling, (number seven corvette in my stable since the C6), the ERay the best corvette I’ve ever owned. Why mess with the perfection of the Brownstown eAWD propulsion and battery assembly plant for the new ones? Because GM can, sigh. I do wish the new owners of Rochester-assembled eAWD propulsion systems in the ZR1-X and GS-X the same perfection personified that the Brownstown ERay’s system has enjoyed these past three years. But know one thing for certain: the product GM makes better than cars, and that is their lawyers who fight owner-class action lawsuits.
GM was sending engines and transmissions to Mexico to put in Chevy trucks and Blazers. Then shipping trucks and Blazers back to USA. Before GM built stamping plant in Arlington, Texas for big SUVs they shipped parts from Detroit everyday, by truck and train. It was really a zoo, like Lansing Grand River plant. When I was there, big crane taking down Oldsmobile sign, they were making Camaros and Cadillacs on same assembly line. Parts were coming from everywhere, I worked at Flint and the Delta plant and Ft Wayne in one year.