GM Canada's CAMI plant ends Equinox output and starts BrightDrop retool for EV future

Mike Van Boekel recalls the heady early years of Chevrolet Equinox production at General Motors’ CAMI Assembly Plant, when dozens of half-finished crossovers were sent along Highway 401 each day to the Oshawa Assembly Plant 200 kilometres east.

“We would put five at a time on a trailer and send about three or four trailers every hour to Oshawa,” said Van Boekel, currently Unifor Local 88’s chairman for CAMI, located in Ingersoll, Ont. “And then Oshawa would paint them and trim them out.”

The shuttle program, as it was known, was set up to relieve the bursting pressure at CAMI.

Despite running three shifts and scheduled Saturday overtime, the plant could not keep up with voracious demand for the Equinox or CAMI’s other hit vehicle, the GMC Terrain. Trucking a couple of hundred extra Equinox bodies each day to Oshawa for final assembly helped boost GM’s output.

For workers at CAMI, the drastic measure was one of the program’s many high notes. “We worked six days, right through, for years and years, and that really became the norm in our plant,” Van Boekel said. “It was a great run. It provided great stability for members.”

Now, as one run ends, another is set to begin.

Nearly 20 years after landing the Equinox program, the final crossover rolled off CAMI’s line April 28. The next day, a $1-billion retool started to transform the plant into Canada’s first large-scale electric-vehicle assembly site.

“Internally, it’s going to be a complete overhaul. Even the offices, the entire floor, everything is going to be ripped [out] and basically redone inside.”

Marissa West, president of GM Canada said in a statement Friday that CAMI Assembly is playing a key role in GM’s vision for a zero emissions future.

“We plan to retool our Ingersoll plant in record time to support the start of BrightDrop EV production in Canada before year end,” she said.

‘BITTERSWEET’ TRANSITION

Among the plant’s unionized workforce, feelings about the shift are mixed, said Shane Wark, Unifor’s lead on automotive and assistant to the union’s national president.

“They built the Equinox for a long time there, so to see that vehicle leave the plant is a bit bittersweet for a lot of our leadership and a lot of our members,” Wark said. “But at the same time, they’re the first plant ... to transition to electrification, and there’s a lot of excitement around that.”

As more details about the incoming BrightDrop commercial vehicle come into focus, Van Boekel is optimistic.

“As one door closes, another one opens, and I think the future looks fantastic, and I think the stability is going to be there for a long, long time.”

Stability — mirroring the early days of the Equinox program — has been missing at CAMI.

Last year was particularly challenging for plant staff as the industrywide microchip shortage kept the plant drastically under capacity. The plant produced about 50,000 vehicles in 2021, according to the Automotive News Research & Data Center in Detroit. This compares with high points in the past decade when more than 300,000 a year — combined Equinox and Terrain — would roll off the line.

“We shut down in February, ran for three weeks in June,” Van Boekel said of 2021. “And other than that, we didn’t run again until November, so our members went through a very tough period.”

The complete loss of the Terrain, and the Equinox program’s partial shift to a pair of plants in Mexico in 2017, have also remained sore spots at CAMI, Van Boekel said. Nearly 3,000 Local 88 members went on strike in 2017, partly in an effort to secure the Ontario site as the lead plant for Equinox assembly. The roughly fourweek strike ended without the workers securing the mandate.

“It hurts because now Mexico is going to keep on building the Equinox,” Van Boekel said.

AN ELECTRIC ERA BEGINS

Workers at CAMI will now tackle two very different products.

BrightDrop CEO Travis Katz said CAMI is scheduled to begin producing the BrightDrop Zevo 600 in December after about eight months of retooling. It will add the smaller Zevo 400 in 2023.

It is an “ambitious timeline,” Katz said, before adding that has been par for the course throughout the program, which went from conception to the first deliveries in about 20 months. The transition, he said, will make for an exciting time at CAMI.

“EVs are very different, you know, how you put it together than a traditional ICE vehicle, so everyone’s going to have to learn a lot of new stuff, but this is the future, so it’s pretty exciting to see it come to life.”

The new vans will mean a slower line speed, fewer stations with more to do at each and higher voltages requiring more stringent safety training, Van Boekel said, adding that the larger vehicles will also mean fewer vehicles being built.

“Whereas ... most high-volume plants are making a vehicle every minute, we’ll be making one [BrightDrop] about every five to six minutes.” Van Boekel.

Despite the changeover, staffing at the plant is expected to remain consistent.

All hourly employees laid off heading into the retrofit will be able to return to work as BrightDrop production ramps up, Van Boekel said. If the plant gets back to three shifts, this will mean about 1,500 hourly jobs, he said.

Although this is slightly more than half of the nearly 3,000 employed just a few years ago to build the Equinox, Unifor hopes GM will bring more subassembly jobs for the BrightDrop program in-house, helping to boost staffing.

BrightDrop currently has more than 25,000 production reservations for its electric delivery vans to serve the growing market for electric delivery solutions, from some of the world’s largest companies. GM Canada said Friday that CAMI is anticipated to ramp up to two shifts of production in early 2023, with the ability to accelerate to three shifts, market permitting.

Greg Layson of Automotive News Canada contributed to this report.