General Motors CEO Mary Barra will pay a visit to the Tonawanda engine plant in New York today, but she’s not expected to announce any investments in the plant.
The Buffalo News reported on Mary Barra’s scheduled visit on Wednesday. Joining her will be Gerald Johnson, executive vice president of global manufacturing. Johnson was promoted to the position after Alicia Boler-Davis announced her departure from the automaker. She’s rumored to have potentially accepted a job with Amazon.
GM Tonawanda in New York
Barra plans to meet with the plant’s employees and speak with them and a GM spokesperson reiterated that she will not deliver any news surrounding investments in the New York plant. The Tonawanda engine plant most recently received a $300 million investment to build the 6.6-liter V8 engine found in the 2020 Chevrolet Silverado HD. The plant was also awarded production of the 2019 Silverado 1500’s 5.3-liter and 6.2-liter V8 engines last year.
In addition to the Silverado’s V8 engines, Tonawanda also assembles the 4.3-liter V6 engine found in certain Silverado models, the 2.0-liter turbo and 2.5-liter four-cylinder Ecotec engines, and the 6.2-liter LT1 V8 engine.
In the past decade, GM has invested nearly $3 billion in the Tonawanda plant. Currently, the plant staffs 1,395 hourly and salaried employees and remains one of the largest engine production hubs in North America.
Barra has come under fire by the Trump administration and both the United Auto Workers and Unifor unions in the U.S. and Canada. Under her watch, she initiated a massive manufacturing restructuring operation in North America that included white-collar layoffs. In total, some 14,000 people have been laid off or remain wondering if a manufacturing plant will come back online.
The UAW will negotiate a new labor contract this year with the current contract set to expire this September. On the table are the futures of the Lordstown and Detroit-Hamtramck production facilities and two transmission plants in the U.S. that GM seeks to shut down permanently.
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Source: The Buffalo News
Comments
Keep an eye on this: Barra will make some news regarding the C8 Corvette.
The Chev and GMC 2500 and 3500 pickup trucks will use the new design 6.6 liter gas engine as standard equipment for the 2020 models, built in Tonawanda. Orders for the crew cab version can be placed now for the 2020 HD 2500 and 3500’s. The regular cab and extended cab models of the 2020 2500/3500, can be placed near the end of May. That is the info for Canadian orders, it might be a bit different for the U.S. based orders. Since the 6.6 liter gasser is a heavy duty engine, it is a cast iron type, not aluminum block. At a truck trade show a few weeks ago, the GM engine rep said that even thou the new 6.6 liter gas engine has siamese cylinders, it also has mini water jackets between each cylinder, which allows it to run much cooler when using propane which burns very hot because it is about 37 percent hydrogen. The very high compression ratio on the new 6.6 liter for 2020 of 10.8 to one ratio, will improve torque and HP at the lower end RPM by a significant amount. The old 2019 6.0 liter gas engine has only a max of 380 pounds feet of torque with a 9.7 to one CR, so the 464 lbs feet of torque of the 6.6 liter is a significant jump up.