The Fremont joint venture where Toyota taught GM the system; visited from Berkeley IEOR in the eighties; the same building is now Tesla's factory
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. — the Toyota–GM joint venture in Fremont, California — reopened GM's shuttered Fremont Assembly in December 1984 and ran until April 2010, when GM's bankruptcy ended the venture and Tesla bought the plant that is now its Fremont Factory. The history that matters to this record is the inversion the plant demonstrated: GM Fremont had been notorious as one of the worst plants in the system, and under the Toyota Production System, with substantially the same workforce, NUMMI produced the highest quality and productivity in GM's entire network — on the lowest capital investment, with no robots, while GM was pouring billions into robotics elsewhere to buy the same improvements.
Jonathan Hare visited from UC Berkeley's Industrial Engineering and Operations Research department in the eighties, at the height of Japan's manufacturing dominance, having studied the Toyota Production System throughout his time there while the field around him focused on robotics. What the visit taught is the episode; what the plant proved is on every page of this record's argument: the leverage was never the machinery. It was the coordination system — and who it empowered.
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