Canada-based supplier of vehicle bedliners to GM, Ground Effects Ltd., also known as GFX, has announced a planned production facility in Michigan, close to the Lake Orion Assembly plant.
The plan calls for the GFX facility to be ready to apply bedliners to the Chevy Silverado EV and GMC Sierra EV when they start rolling off the Lake Orion assembly line in the near future, Crain’s Detroit Business reports.
The GFX facility will be built from the ground up rather than being located in an existing building because of its need for special features such as entrance doors 56 feet wide. The plant will be modeled after existing GFX locations, since the company’s strategy involves building such facilities near major customers and currently has 40 bedliner plants in operation globally.
As all-electric pickups come off the assembly line at Lake Orion, the close proximity of the GFX plant will enable them to be driven there immediately. Once at the facility, the trucks will roll into waiting paint booths. Inside, an array of robotic arms, probably seven to eight in number, will spray Ground Effects bedliners into the Chevy Silverado EV and GMC Sierra EV beds. The facility will handle up to 960 trucks daily.
Though heavily automated, the GFX facility will employ approximately 250 people in three shifts. During a six-day work week it will run 24 hours a day, with some weeks seeing the facility operational on Sunday as well. The production building will occupy 108,000 square feet on a 22-acre property where an earlier commercial structure was torn down with city approval.
Ground Effects Ltd. says it needs to have to its facility open and fully operational by the time the two EV truck nameplates go into production. The General is currently in the process of retooling Lake Orion Assembly for production of electric pickups.
However, while GFX originally believed this would require them to have their bedliner application facility operational by sometime in 2024, GM has pushed back the launch of production at Lake Orion to 2025, perhaps indicating demand for the Silverado EV and Sierra EV is not as robust as originally thought.
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Comments
Cool. GFX has facilities within a few miles of all the GM truck plants too. Ft Wayne, Flint, Oshawa, Silao and Wentzville. I’m 99% sure they also have facilities within distance of Ford and Ram as I believe they spray their factory liners as well.
They most definitely do for Ford. They have a facility in SubTropolis that serves the Kansas City (Claycomo) F-150 plant.
The “22-acre property where an earlier commercial structure was torn down with city approval” was the Palace, where the Detroit Pistons played for so many years.