Automotive industry in Flint, Michigan
Over the past several decades, General Motors plants in Genesee County have experienced re-namings, management shifts, openings, closures, reopenings, and spinoffs.
After gutting the interior, installing robots (and other retooling), and the construction of a new body shop and just-in-time delivery docks, Buick City began building front-wheel drive vehicles in 1985.
GM created the Flint Automotive Division to manage BOC's activities in Genesee County, which included the former Buick factories and engineering.
The adjacent former Buick transmission, transmission-parts, engine-assembly and engine-parts plants (GM Powertrain and Flint North) closed by December 2010.
This plant manufactured spark plugs, air, oil and fuel filters, instrument clusters and other parts.
World headquarters remained in Flint, soon moving to the Great Lakes Technology Center.
A GM Service Parts Operations packaging and processing center has opened in the easternmost plant in the complex, on Davison Road in Burton.
[5][6] This was also originally known as the Flint Wagon Works[7] before it was relocated to its current location, known as Buick City.
[9] Events at this plant during the late 1970s are chronicled in Ben Hamper's 1991 book Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line.
During the late 1990s, GM's worldwide parts purchasing and distribution office headquarters moved from here to a new building in Grand Blanc Township.
Known as Service Parts Operations-Flint, the Swartz Creek facility remains open with a large amount of vacant office space.
Recently, a new processing/packaging center has opened on Davison Road in Burton, in a former AC Spark Plug (later Delphi) plant.
[12] This plant was located on South Saginaw Street, and manufactured Buick bodies and pressed-metal parts.
After Buick ceased building rear-wheel-drive cars and Buick City got underway, BOC Flint Body Assembly earned a reprieve by building bodies which were shipped to GM assembly operations in Pontiac, Michigan until the plant closed in December 1987.
Most of it was demolished in 1988, except for portions which were gutted and transformed into the Great Lakes Technology Center; the original administration building remains intact.
GM initially had substantial office and engineering operations at the GLTC (including AC Rochester world headquarters), but eventually transferred those staffs elsewhere.
[13] GM announced in January 2013 that Grand Blanc Weld Tool would close to an extent in six months.
Finally, in 1996 Delphi sold the Coldwater Road factory to Peregrine Inc, which attempted to make the plant profitable before closing it around 1998.
Roger & Me is a 1989 American documentary film directed by Flint area native Michael Moore.
Moore portrays the regional economic impact of General Motors CEO Roger Smith's action of closing several auto plants in his hometown of Flint, Michigan—reducing GM's employees in that area from 80,000 in 1978 to about 50,000 in 1992.
