Fort Wayne: The Big Three's Last Stand

While there was plenty of losers in GM’s recent federally orchestrated bankruptcy, winners also emerged. One of them is the Fort Wayne Assembly plant in Roanoke, the last Big Three assembly plant in the state.

A confluence of forces has contributed to the drop in sales. High gas prices last year and the recession have made the sales outlook shaky, and you can add to that GM’s and Chrysler’s tenuous standing after emerging from bankruptcy. However, there is some hope that stimulus-supported projects and a home-building rebirth could give new life to pickup sales in 2010 and beyond.

Before GM’s restructuring, Pontiac Assembly Center in Pontiac, Mich., also built pickup trucks. That plant recently closed, and now Fort Wayne is one of three plants building General Motors’ full-size trucks.

“I’m happy it happened,” said Mark Gevaart, a 29-year GM employee at Fort Wayne Assembly, talking about GM’s government bailout. “I’m in a position to say that because I’m in a facility that’s still building trucks, that’s still working right now. We didn’t get ‘Oh, your plant’s closing; you have an opportunity to go to this plant here.’ I don’t have that upheaval in my life, so my perspective is skewed.”

An Important Community Member
Opened in 1986, Fort Wayne Assembly employs more than 2,600 people and last year produced nearly 190,000 pickup trucks. Beyond that, its presence has been a boon to the region.

“There’s a whole bunch of businesses in this community who have been spawned from the amount of people who’ve come here and transferred here” because of Fort Wayne Assembly, Gevaart said.

“Fort Wayne is one of the best quality plants General Motors has,” said John Stoeckley, president of the Roanoke Town Council. “They’ve always had a good work force, a good management team.”

However, the plant’s early days remain a sore spot for some.

“There’s an animosity here because there’s some folks that lived here in this town who couldn’t get a job here. … The UAW had negotiated with General Motors that if you’re going to build the facility, you’re going to transfer people from another facility to come here,” Gevaart said.

Pickups Down But Not Out
Like other large vehicles, pickup truck sales have been battered by the spike in gas prices last year and the carpocalypse that followed. Sales of the Silverado, for example, are down 38 percent through September. It’s a segment that Erich Merkle, president of industry analysis firm Autoconomy.com, said shouldn’t be written off.

“A lot of people have counted the pickup truck for dead,” Merkle said. “It isn’t.”

Gevaart agrees: “There’s still going to be demand, so I don’t think that’s going to lessen what we do here everyday.”

However, potential competition for the conventional pickup looms on the horizon from upstart companies like Electric Motors Corp., which has a vehicle center in Wakarusa, just northwest of Fort Wayne. The company is in the process of converting Ford F-150 pickups into trucks that can travel 20-40 miles on an electric charge before relying on a conventional combustion engine. Gevaart, however, isn’t worried about electric trucks — for now.

“When I look at electric trucks I look at towing capacity, torque. Gas mileage is wonderful but can it haul the fifth-wheel trailer? Is it going to haul all those tools to the construction site?

“I still think you’re going to have to prove that truck out. I don’t think it’s a threat today,” Gevaart said. “Could it be a threat in a decade from now? Absolutely.”

What Gevaart does see changing are consumers’ attitudes.

“Will America’s tastes change? Sure, and that’ll continue that way. It’s generational. When I grew up I listened to my parents talk about how it had to be buy American, it had to be made in America, it had to be a Chevy, GM or a Chrysler and that’s how it was.

“Now with transplants and a channel-changer, text-message thinking and priority to life, no one gives a damn where the vehicle was made,” Gevaart said. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care if it was a union or a nonunion. That doesn’t matter to me.

“I want this vehicle to look this way and can I get it. The hot new thing that’s on the street? That’s what I want.”

Next: Greensburg: A Year With Honda

Previously: Does a Phoenix Grow in Elkhart?