Good Bye NUMMI.

Tomorrow is April 1. Unfortunately it won't be a joke when the last Toyota Corolla will come off the production line at NUMMI. New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI) is an automobile manufacturing facility in Fremont, California. NUMMI is perhaps most famous for being Toyota's first North American production facility, but it was originally a General Motors production plant. GM had to shut the plant down in the 1980s due to a variety of factors, including low productivity, poor quality, and generally FUBAR relations between GM and the UAW.

This American Life made a podcast on this, and it is fairly good.

In the mid-1980s, Toyota was looking to setup shop in the United States. The Japanese car manufacturer had realized that GM, with its heavy political base, was capable of influencing protectionist policies in the US Congress. However, Toyota had never dealt with American laborers, and had no experience with setting up shop in North America, so they entered into a joint venture with GM, reopening the factory and implementing Toyota's lean manufacturing.

The joint venture was an instant success. For nearly two decades, NUMMI built the the most reliable vehicles sold under a GM badge, such as the Geo/Chevrolet Prizm or Pontiac Vibe.

NUMMI was proof that there was nothing fundamentally wrong or uncompetitive about the American worker - it demonstrated that poor productivity and consistency was the result of a bad structure and lousy labor relations.

Unfortunately, with the demise and bankruptcy of GM, the joint venture ended. Toyota, which has excess production capacity in North America, decided to close the plant. Good Bye NUMMI.