Oshawa Car Assembly

Oshawa Car Assembly (GM Oshawa) is a major manufacturing facility in the city of Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, building various automobiles for General Motors Canada. The factory was one of the largest auto plants in the world and has won a number of awards. The plant is part of the larger GM Autoplex, which includes the now closed Oshawa Truck Assembly.

The facility has over 10 million square feet (930,000 m²) of factory floor. It was converted to a state of the art Flexible Manufacturing facility in 2008, which involved the consolidation of two car plants. Approximately 2,600 hourly and 300 salaried employees currently work at the plant. The hourly-rated workers are represented by their union, Unifor Local 222.

Current products include the Buick Regal and Cadillac XTS with Chevrolet Silverado production to be added by 2018. The next generation Buick Regal will be assembled in Germany for the North American market.

The facility has produced vehicles since 1907. It was one of six locations building Chevrolet before it merged with GM in 1918. In January 1918, Oshawa became the first Canadian GM plant to minimize the issue of large scale layoffs by cutting the second shift and alternating day- and night-shift workers at two-week intervals. This system was later adopted at other plants around the continent.

In the mid-1980s, GM began a large transformation of the facility, naming the site "Autoplex." The changeover came in three steps, the first being conversion of the truck plant to GMT400 production in 1986. The next step was retooling Line 2 for the new W-body Regal, which began production in mid-1987. The final instalment was a long changeover of Line 1 for the Chevrolet Lumina, which went into production on January 8, 1989 as a 1990 model.

The Chevrolet Monte Carlo and Pontiac Grand Prix were discontinued in June and November 2007 respectively. The Buick LaCrosse was discontinued from Oshawa #2 in 2008 and moved to Fairfax Assembly for 2009. In the fourth quarter of that year, it began producing the new Chevrolet Camaro. Both the Buick Regal and the Camaro Convertible launched on the Flex Line in the first quarter of 2011. The plant began the production of high performance 2012 Camaro ZL1 and the 2012 Buick Regal GS in 2012 and will build the 2013 Cadillac XTS in the first quarter of 2012.

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