1999 Chevrolet

Canadian Automotive Museum Audio Content

Our bilingual audio tour explores less well-known stories from the collection, in the voices of the Museum’s volunteers, historians, vehicle experts and more.
Transcript:
Historically speaking, the Chevrolet Lumina isn’t exactly a record-breaking or trend-setting vehicle, but it’s a perfect symbol of vehicle mass production during the auto boom years of the 1990s. My name is Greg Pratt and I’m the retired Plant Manager of the GM Oshawa Assembly Plant. This particular Lumina, signed by hundreds of GM Oshawa auto workers in celebration of the plant winning an illustrious quality control award, speaks to just how many people were, and are, involved in the production of a car.

For decades, the idea of manufacturing cars has carried with it strong associations with robotics; we might imagine gleaming assembly lines crawling with brightly-coloured robotic arms, welding, bolting and tightening. While this association isn’t wrong, it only speaks to a tiny percentage of the total work that would go into building a Lumina.

Robotics would have been directly used to assemble the 2000 or so parts that make up a Lumina only in the welding of the body, attachment of the windows and painting. Every other step was done by hand, though not without help. Some stages along the moving assembly line would be as simple as placing parts inside the shell of the vehicle for later steps; imagine putting a floor mat into a car every 30 seconds or so for 8 hours, and you’ll get the right idea. Others involved huge mechanical support structures, designed to take the weight of larger parts like doors, dashboards and even engines while workers bolted them in place.

The entire process was computer-controlled, but entirely through human intermediaries. Plant computers were there to, for instance, measure tolerances and ensure that red doors were only attached to red car bodies, but every step involved a human being physically scanning and checking the barcodes to ensure that what was going on on the line matched what was going on in the computer.

When you take into account painting and final checks on the vehicle, each Lumina took a full 24 hours to build, a pretty big time investment for the more than 3000 auto workers in the plant at the time. It’s no wonder they signed the thing.