Built With Pride

The very first prototype Corvette, which was assigned serial number EX-52, was completed on December 22, 1952. A little more than six months later, Corvette production began on a temporary, six-car-long assembly line set up in a small customer delivery building on Van Slyke Avenue in Flint, Michigan. By December 1953 approximately 300 Corvettes had been completed there.

While the ’53 Corvettes were being built in Flint, a portion of Missouri’s immense St. Louis Truck Assembly Plant complex, at the intersection of Union Boulevard and Natural Bridge Avenue, was being readied as a permanent home for Corvette production. The Fisher Mill Building, so named because it began as a mill that produced wooden body parts for Chevrolet touring and roadster bodies, became the permanent site for piecing together Chevy’s new sports car. This facility occupied all 266,025 square feet of the Fisher Mill Building, while the remainder of the St. Louis complex continued to crank out Chevrolet passenger cars and trucks, just as it had done since 1920.

Corvette assembly began in St. Louis in December of 1953 and continued there for almost 28 years. By August 1, 1981, when production in St. Louis concluded, almost 700,000 Corvettes had been built in the Gateway City. Sadly, the plant had simply outlived its practical usefulness. An acute lack of space, antiquated equipment, and a fast-approaching need to build a new paint shop that would comply with increasingly strict emissions regulations led Chevrolet to move Corvette assembly to a one-million-square-foot facility in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

The Bowling Green site was not a new structure, having served previously as a Chrysler Corporation air-conditioning plant, but it was gutted and completely rebuilt for Corvette production. The first Corvette rolled off the end of the line there on June 1, 1981, marking the beginning of a new chapter in marque history. When production transitioned from the C3 to C4 model in 1983, the plant was significantly reconfigured. The changes were even more dramatic when the fifth-generation car went into production for model year 1997, but given the same basic vehicle architecture that stretched from C5 to C7, it was relatively easy to retool for the subsequent two generations. The changeover to C8, however, required a near-total redesign of the facility. This included a brand-new body shop, paint shop, chassis shop, cockpit line, and extensive revisions to the general assembly line.

A New Era

The changes required to accommodate the C8’s mid-engine architecture gave GM’s manufacturing specialists the opportunity to make the Bowling Green Assembly Plant (BGAP) more efficient in every measure. This has yielded improved ergonomics for the workforce, a reduced environmental impact, and a dramatically higher range of models, options, and configurations. The result is the highest-quality, safest, and best-performing Corvettes Chevrolet has ever created.

The people who work at the Bowling Green plant are justifiably proud of what they do. They appreciate the fact that they’re not building an endless stream of utilitarian machines that will be used up and then discarded one day. Ask any one of them what they do for a living and you won’t hear “I work on the trim line,” “I’m an inspector,” or anything so specific. Instead, you’ll typically get one simple, pride-filled response that says it all: “I build Corvettes.”

As its name implies, BGAP is primarily an assembly plant. This means that a vast array of components manufactured elsewhere are brought together here to be turned into finished cars. In many parts of the plant, however, the distinction between assembling and manufacturing is blurred. Some things, such as seats and transmissions, arrive at BGAP in their final form and are simply installed. But other items, such as exterior body panels, go through preparation and finishing processes in the plant. And in some cases, individual parts are joined into complex assemblies in-house. The cockpit and doors are two examples of this. The body structure is another, with each individual component getting attached to another on the body line to create the finished product.

The process of building Corvettes begins at 6:00 a.m. each weekday. To meet continued strong demand for the C8, the plant is presently on an eight-hour-shift, two-shift-per-day schedule. Though it can be a challenge to wrap your head around everything that’s happening inside, it’s easier when you think of it as a very precisely choreographed mechanical dance that brings together individual components and assemblies in a sort of “funneling” process.

BGAP has multiple subassembly lines or areas that feed into the two primary subassembly lines—one for the chassis and another for the body. What the plant calls “chassis sub,” for example, is where assemblies that get attached to the chassis are put together. This includes the engine-and-transmission combination and everything that comes together to comprise each corner of the chassis—e.g., the knuckles, hubs, brake rotors, calipers, etc. Each completed chassis subassembly, as well as individual parts, are placed into position on the large Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) that carries the chassis along on the chassis sub line.

The same process of smaller sub-assemblies and individual parts coming together takes place for the body on the “body sub” line. In a key moment the nearly completed bodies on the body sub line, and the nearly completed chassis on the chassis sub line, merge for what’s colorfully called the “marriage.” This is where the chassis and bodies are joined to create what look like almost-finished C8 Corvettes. Plant personnel refer to the process of merging the components and small assemblies from the different sub-assembly lines to create a finished car as a “layered build.”

The married bodies and chassis keep moving along from station to station, where all of the remaining parts are installed. Near the end of the line, each car is filled with fuel, oil, and all other required fluids, and then the engine gets its initial startup. A little while later each car is set down on the floor and, for the first time, bears its own weight. Before any car rolls out of the plant, a battery of final adjustments, inspections, and tests are carried out to ensure that every car is flawless.

While the overall procedures in Bowling Green are similar to the ones found in other modern vehicle-assembly plants, there are a few areas where the Corvette diverges. For example, in other facilities most, if not all, of the body panels—including the doors, hood, and trunk—are combined with quarter panels and fenders, then attached to the main shell before paint is applied. The entire “body in white” is then painted as a complete assembly. At the Corvette plant, all the individual body panels are placed on a buck and painted before they are attached to the main body structure. This method facilitates the assembly and installation of the parts behind the panels, and minimizes the risk of exterior paint getting damaged in the process.

Another area where Corvette assembly differs from the norm is the relatively high job-cycle time found there. BGAP uses a five-minute job cycle, which means every person on the line has approximately five minutes’ worth of job content. Most plants have about one minute’s worth, meaning that each person must know how to properly perform a minute’s worth of functions. In the Corvette plant each person must know five minutes’ worth. When you consider the potential number of variations, encompassing different models, body styles, and trim levels, as well as the unusually high number of available options, five minutes’ worth of assembly can get very complicated for the workers on the line.

Adding to the complexity in the Corvette plant, cars are not built in batches, so all models—coupes, convertibles, Z06s, and ZR1s in both left- and right-hand drive versions—are built simultaneously on the same line. As a result, a lot of the tasks that each employee performs can change from one vehicle to the next, as different models with different standard and optional equipment come along.

The complex nature of Corvette assembly is challenging for those who do it, but it’s also more rewarding. And for many, it’s also far more interesting, adding one more reason why the people who work in the Bowling Green Assembly Plant tend to genuinely love their jobs.