The Last Oldsmobile

On April twenty-ninth, two thousand four, the last Oldsmobile ever built rolled off the assembly line at the Lansing Car Assembly plant. It was a two thousand four Alero, painted dark cherry metallic. Workers signed the hood. A century of American automotive history in Lansing ended not with a shutdown notice but with a car nobody could quite bring themselves to watch drive away.

Oldsmobile had been part of General Motors since nineteen oh eight, when William Durant absorbed the company into his new industrial conglomerate. The brand survived the Depression, the postwar boom, and the Japanese import era of the nineteen seventies and eighties. The Lansing plant had been operating continuously since nineteen oh one, making it the longest-running automobile factory in United States history at the time of its closure. During World War Two, workers here produced roughly twenty-one million cannon shells for the Army Ordnance Department. The plant was a weapons factory for four years and a car factory for everything else.

By the late nineteen nineties, Oldsmobile had lost its identity. Positioned between Buick and Pontiac without a clear market niche, it struggled to attract younger buyers. In December of two thousand General Motors announced the brand's discontinuation. It would take four more years to wind down production, honoring existing dealer agreements and finishing out the model lines.

Demolition of the Lansing plant was complete by two thousand seven. The site is now under redevelopment.

Ransom Olds, who had started all of this in a Lansing machine shop more than a hundred years before, had died in nineteen fifty. He did not see the end. The city he put on the map still carries his name in its streets, its museum, and its neighborhoods.