Cruze unveiling opens new chapter in Lordstown saga

The first vehicle off the Lordstown General Motors Assembly line on April 28, 1966, was a gleaming white four-door Impala. That was the same year that Chevrolet aired a memorable commercial in which a 1966 Impala was blown to smithereens. The film was run backward so that a cloud of debris coalesced into a car.

We don’t know if that car was a Lordstown Impala, but we do know that Chevy made good things happen for the Mahoning Valley in 1966, and it has been doing so almost continuously since. Over the years, the Lordstown plant has produced various Pontiacs, GMCs, Buicks and Oldsmobiles. But Chevrolet stands alone as the constant among the 15 million vehicles coming down the assembly line.

On Wednesday, the next chapter will open in a half-century of Chevrolet history here. The second generation of the Lordstown-built Cruze, the all-new 2016 model, will be unveiled at the Detroit auto show. And it promises to provide something that Chevy has been bragging about for nearly a century – quality at a low cost.

General Motors spent an estimated $75 million to build its first assembly plant at Lordstown, and more than 35,000 applications were received in 1966 for the start-up jobs. About 4,500 were hired in the early years, and employment at the complex ballooned to a high of 12,000 in 1985. Today, the workforce is back to about 4,500, but due to advances in technology, that smaller workforce can still turn out about 50 cars per hour. The difference is that today’s cars are state-of-the-art, more attractive and among the best values on the market.

BUMPY ROAD TO SUCCESS

Chevrolet’s road through Lordstown has not always been smooth. Its first foray into the small economy-car market was with the Vega in 1971, a little car that was supposed to do everything well, but fell short of its aspirations. And through the years, there were labor problems. The story of how cultural changes among both managers and salaried workers saved the plant has been told many times.

In an ironic twist, a plant in Mexico will begin producing the Cruze for sale in that country. But GM’s decision is not a reflection on Lordstown; it’s a commentary on deteriorating labor relations between GM and its workers in a South Korean plant that had exported the Cruze to Mexico.

Today, the Lordstown-built Cruze not only competes with foreign competitors, it also is a great American value that beats them in sales, in reviews by automotive experts and in consumer satisfaction. People eye it, try it and buy it.

Since the Lordstown plant was built, GM has invested more than a billion dollars in improvements, including about $250 million in recent years aimed at making the new generation of Cruze a success.

The Cruze is the company’s “world car” with global sales of 3 million, more than a third of which were built here in Lordstown. GM says that the Cruze is the cornerstone of Chevrolet’s North American small-car lineup, and it looks for the car to continue to attract young, first-time customers to Chevy showrooms. It may be a world car, but it’s also a car that makes sense for America. And that makes the Lordstown plant as important to General Motors as it is to the Mahoning Valley.

For generations, people have been seeing the USA in a Chevrolet. What we see runs deeper than that. Chevrolet is as much a part of the Valley as baseball, hot dogs and apple pie.

Wednesday’s unveiling of the new Cruze in Detroit will show the automotive world what’s new today in a Chevrolet, but it goes beyond interesting to those of us in the Mahoning Valley, where Chevy makes good things happen. We all have a stake in the future success of the Cruze and the Lordstown plant. The plant and its products are not only a source of pride and satisfaction, they also are like a rock that provides the economic foundation for the Valley as no other industry has since the decline of basic steel.

We’ll all be rooting for a successful launch of the Cruze on Wednesday.

Anything sound familiar above?

Throughout this editorial, about a dozen phrases appear that were taken from Chevrolet ad campaigns dating to 1922, as reported in Advertising Age. A key to those phrases will appear in tomorrow’s “Our Voice” editorial column.