It's Out With Old, In With New as Former Toyota Plant Becomes the Tesla Factory

It's Out With Old, In With New as Former Toyota Plant Becomes the Tesla Factory

By Scott Doggett October 1, 2010

By Scott Doggett, Contributing Editor

FREMONT, Calif. - Yesterday, under a gorgeous sky, ravens cawed from atop the massive walls that for 26 years contained workers and equipment who produced 6 million passenger vehicles in buildings so sprawling their dark concrete floors could have concealed 88 football fields.

At times the ravens' cries were the only sounds carried on the dry breeze that weaved between the cavernous five-story buildings that, until only last spring, turned out gleaming new automobiles at the stupendous rate of 6,000 a week.   

The factory was constructed in 1984 on the site of a General Motors assembly plant that had been built in 1960. When that plant closed in 1982, the United Auto Workers union considered the Fremont employees "the worst workforce in the automobile industry in the United States."

Some of the GM employees drank booze on the job, were absent so much that at times the production line couldn't be started, and even sabotaged some of the vehicles they made (by putting Coke bottles inside door panels so they'd rattle, for instance), the union said.

In spite of their reputation, many of the workers were rehired when GM and Toyota formed a joint venture, constructed the buildings the ravens perch on today, and opened New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., or NUMMI, as the factory (above) was generally known. The American and Japanese auto manufacturers worked together until June 2009, when GM pulled out of the venture.

At 9:40 a.m. on April 1 of this year, the plant produced its last car, a red Toyota Corolla S. Production of Corollas in North America has since been moved to Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada's assembly plant in Cambridge, Ontario. The Canadian Auto Workers union has failed to organize the workers there, much to Toyota's delight.

Yesterday, NUMMI still existed, its innards - the assembly line and other areas used to make Toyota Corollas - mostly gone or being hauled off by a few men with forklifts to another part of the site, where the machinery was being auctioned.

The remnants of break rooms scattered throughout the complex and used by workers 30 minutes at a time have been gutted of their refrigerators, microwave ovens, benches and tables. Lockers for personal effects stood in clusters, empty and dusty. Harsh light beamed down from the few skylights, steel I-beams with an industrial coldness lined the walls and ceilings. Pits 30 feet deep that housed paint lay empty like drained gray swimming pools.

Motion-activated overhead lamps popped on as this writer and a source (neither NUMMI nor Tesla employees were giving tours yesterday, so the source will remain unidentified) wandered over acres of concrete floors, imagining what had been - and what is yet to come. It took little imagination to "see" what NUMMI had once been in its prime.

Today, Oct. 1, 2010, Tesla Motors took over ownership of the 5.5-million-square-foot building complex from Toyota. The Tesla Factory, although more than a year away from producing cars, was born today. And with its birth, NUMMI died. Even the official NUMMI Website vanished overnight.

Like ghosts, former NUMMI workers will methodically continue to dismantle and remove most of the equipment used by Toyota during the final throes of the storied NUMMI plant. That work, I was told, may continue till March. It takes time disassembling a factory that took a quarter-century to assemble.

But some of the old pieces of equipment - machines as big as small houses, for example, that will stamp aluminum into the body panels of the first model Tesla will build at the factory - will remain. They are easy to identify because they bear signs that read "Tesla Acquired Asset." The equipment Tesla passed on - including rows of vertical lights used by Toyota for final inspection - is mostly roped off with caution tape. Soon it will be gone.

And in one part of the Tesla Factory, 50 truckloads of heavy equipment had just arrived from Detroit. Overhead, cranes that could move buildings awaited instructions from engineers, some of whom are in the process of being recruited from conventional automakers and will use their skills to ensure the colossal pieces are perfectly placed.

But Tesla has hired plenty of the plant's engineers already. In a gym-size room that had served as the NUMMI visitors center, Toyota allowed Tesla to set up shop so dozens of its equipment-placing and -planning engineers could get to work long before today's turnover. On the walls of the room are dozens of schematics, indicating exactly where the huge car-making equipment will go.

And as for the car that Tesla will initially produce here? As our regular readers know, that would be the Model S, the second pure electric vehicle (behind the Roadster) that the Palo Alto company will manufacture. Production of the Model S is scheduled to start mid-2012, and well-placed sources at Tesla have told us that every aspect of the vehicle's development is proceeding according to plan.

Scott Doggett:  is an AutoObserver.com Associate Editor.