GM Lansing Craft Centre: how "niche" is spelled - Wip - manufacturing of General Motors North America - Brief Article

Automotive Design & Production,  Nov, 2002  by Gary S. Vasilash

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According to General Motors North America President Gary Cowger, by the end of this year there will be the first 25 of the anxiously awaited Chevy Super Sport Roadster better known simply as the "SSR"--rolling out of the Lansing Craft Centre in Lansing Township Michigan These, Cowger says, will represent the "Signature Series" for this model, and he goes on to say that GM will be creating similar limited-detailed models for other key vehicles in the company lineup. And there could conceivably be plenty of them.

That's because the tooling that's going into the Craft Centre (where the low-volume Buick Reatta and EV1 had been built) is largely manual, which, Cowger notes, means that the plant has comparative flexibility. Cowger suggests that it is possible that there could be niche GM vehicles produced there that would have an entire run of just 50,000 units, manufactured at a rate of 10,000 to 11,000 per year.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Gardner Publications, Inc.
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