By now it’s difficult not to consider the 2010 Chevrolet Equinox and GMC Terrain successful products. After launching nearly a year ago, demand for GM’s latest crossovers has not waned even the least bit. Customers are still reporting wait times in excess of three months- despite GM operating their recently-acquired CAMI plant in Ingersoll, Ontario 24 hours a day, six days a week. This has led GM to quickly come up with solutions to meet the unexpected [to them] demand for the new crossovers.
In March president of GM North America, Mark Reuss announced that GM would be utilizing a creative new method for producing additional crossovers by leveraging GM’s Oshawa, Ontario assembly plant; which is three hours from the CAMI facility. Since the announcement, GM has released little in the way of details of the new plan.
According to GMI sources, Oshawa will start building the Chevrolet Equinox in mid-October. Welded Equinox bodies will be trucked from the CAMI plant to Oshawa, where the bodies will go through paint and final assembly.
GM has reportedly spent about $9.5 Million on a new conveyor system in the second weld shop at CAMI that will fabricate the bodies and place them on trucks—five per truck—to head to Oshawa.
Contrary to initial reports, Oshawa will only be building the Chevrolet Equinox. Sources also tell us that Oshawa will not be building any units with sunroofs, due to the added complexity and expense.
1,200 Per Day
Fairly consistent verbiage we’re hearing from sources is that GM feels they need to produce at least 1,200 Theta crossovers per day to keep up with demand. Today they are producing about 795 units a day at CAMI. A bottleneck in the welding and trim department is restricting the amount they are fully capable of producing.
CAMI will have a shutdown from July 5th to the 16th. During the shutdown engineers and vendors will wrap up construction on expanding the welding shop and roughly 400 more employees will be added to the plant. This will allow the plant to churn out roughly 966 units per day. 966 is said to be the maximum that CAMI can churn out without substantial changes.
In an effort to meet the 1,200 per day goal, Oshawa will be producing about 300 Equinox’s a day when it comes online in October. For the year, Oshawa is projected to build 60,000 Equinox units. Final assembly will be done on the Chevrolet Impala assembly line at Oshawa.
Sources tell GMI that last year GM was projecting it would build 190,000 units at CAMI in 2010. They are now on track to produce 320,000 crossovers at CAMI this year. As of May 31st GM has produced 94,542 crossovers at CAMI thus far this year.
