Corvette Factory tour

Monday 5/12: We got up early and drove 100+/- miles south to Bowling Green, Kentucky this morning. First stop was the Corvette Museum which is located near the General Motors Assembly plan where the sports car is manufactured. They have a nice collection of vette's representing it's many model changes since it was first sold in 1953. The cars are about 50% donated to the museum and 50% on loan from individuals. There is also many drivetrain displays with cut away sections to reveal the inner workings.

Right now the most popular display is the sinkhole and the cars salvaged from it. Eight corvettes fell into the sinkhole on February of this year. They have all been removed and are on display in the condition they were pulled out the hole, dirt and all. If I was making the decision about their repair, I would say half are repairable, two are definitely junk, and another couple are iffy.

The sinkhole shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. Look at how close the skydome is to the gigantic retention pond.

They have a good deal for the gambling corvette fans. The museum raffles off a new corvette every two weeks. They only sell 1000 tickets for each car at $200. That's odds of 999 to 1, way better odds than you get on the lottery.

At noon we went across the road for a tour of the factory. It's a brief walking tour of the main assembly area. The paint shop is off limits, to protect the cars from airborne contamination. The body shop is off limits for safety reasons, you do get to view one of the body shop lines from two lines over. The main assembly tour however brief was interesting and it was the first auto plant Millie has been in so it was all new to her. They don't allow any electronics or photos in the plant so I got all these official GM photos from the internet, go figure?

My biggest impression was that after being out of the business for ten years, not much has changed. The build process is the same as it was at Chrysler and the manufacturing facility is the same as every other auto assembly plant I've ever been in. I told Millie I felt like I could walk in there and go to work, they used the same equipment we used at Newark. She said aren't you glad you don't have to! One thing we didn't have that Bowling Green does is air conditioning. The entire one million square foot building is air conditioned. Useless trivia; Newark Assembly Plant was two million square feet. More useless trivia; the corvette assembly line runs at 17 cars per hour. Newark's line speed varied a lot over the 37 years I worked there but has run as high as 80 cars an hour.

I'm not trying to demean the corvette in any way, it is a about as fine an automobile as you can buy for $58,000, but it is manufactured in about the same way as very other car running down the road.