561: NUMMI (2015)

Ira Glass

Today, we have this story for you about cars-- American cars. And like a lot of stories about American cars, this one is more tragedy than comedy, although there is some comedy in there, too. The good news, of course, about American cars is that American cars are getting better, especially in the last few years. You've probably heard that.

Ira Glass

Michelle Krebs has been covering the auto industry for 35 years. She's now at autotrader.com. She says the reason American cars finally improved--

Ira Glass

How spotty? When Consumer Reports rated the top 10 most reliable car brands this year, only one was American. 9 were foreign. 4 of the top 5, no surprise, were Japanese-- Toyota, Honda, Mazda, and Lexus.

Why are most American cars still not as good as foreign cars? Why is it still taking Detroit so long to learn this lesson? It's not like this reliability problem just snuck up on them, right?

General Motors, the biggest American car maker, started losing market share 50 years ago. Back in the 1960s, GM sold over half the cars in the United States, and then that number just slid lower and lower and lower for decades, until now, it's 18% of all cars sold in the US.

Today's program came out of a question that we had here at the radio show. We genuinely did not understand why American car makers waited until they were nearly extinct-- two of them bankrupt, one of them nearly bankrupt. Why didn't they get on the ball and start making reliable cars that could compete with the Japanese decades ago?

It seemed like, OK, you're running a business. You're losing sales in such a huge way. Why wouldn't you change? It really made no sense.

And we looked around for an explanation, and we learned about this one car factory in California. Here.

What happened at this factory not only illustrates some very interesting answers to that question, it captures a lot of what went wrong in the American car business in the last 35 years. This is a plant in Fremont, California, called NUMMI. NUMMI stands for New United Motor Manufacturing Incorporated.

A modern car plant, by the way, sounds a lot like a casino. The automated gear plays these little songs to let you know that it's running. Driverless robotic carts glide up and down the aisles like R2D2 delivering doors and other parts. Their song is supposed to warn you that they're coming.

The story of this particular factory is actually a famous story among car people. It's taught at business schools. NUMMI was opened in 1984 by GM and Toyota together. The two companies decided that this would be a place that they would build cars with each other.

And if it seems strange to you that two competitors would do this, it seemed strange at the time, also. A headline in Car and Driver about the partnership read, "Hell Freezes Over." But both companies had their reasons. We'll get to those.

At NUMMI, Toyota showed GM all of its secrets. Showed it exactly how it made some of the best-built, most reliable cars in the world back then. GM, at the time, hoped to take these lessons from NUMMI and carry them into all their other plants, all over the country and over the world. That was the 1980s.

And then, well, you know, it didn't go well. GM was one of the car makers who went bankrupt. US taxpayers, you and I, we bailed them out for $50 billion.

And NUMMI closed. This GM plant that seemed like it might be able to teach American car makers how to catch up to their competitors-- it stopped making cars for GM. The sounds that you're hearing right now-- they were recorded in 2010, in the last months before GM shuttered the place, on April Fools' Day that year.

Back then, we put together this story that we're about to play for you today. For a few months before NUMMI closed, Frank Langfitt, who at the time was NPR's automotive correspondent, and one of our producers, Brian Reed, travelled around the country talking to GM workers and managers about what had happened at NUMMI. General Motors and the UAW-- they are secretive cultures. But as you're going to hear, people were blunt when they talked to Frank about this. They were blunt in a way that you rarely hear with auto executives and UAW reps when they're being interviewed by the press.

Act One of our show is going to be about the rise of NUMMI. Act Two is where we get the answer to our question-- what prevented GM from learning from NUMMI for so many years? For WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our show today produced with our colleagues at NPR News.

And now it is my pleasure to turn the story over to Frank Langfitt.

Frank Langfitt

When NUMMI was conceived, General Motors was far and away the world's largest car company. Its US market share was seven times that of Toyota. But each company had a problem that the other company could help them solve.

On GM's side, the problem was small cars. Under government emission guidelines, General Motors had to build them, but they always lost money for GM, and they were lousy quality. So Toyota suggested a joint venture that offered two things. First, Toyota would build a quality small car for GM-- one that would finally turn a profit.

Frank Langfitt

Jeffrey Liker is a professor of industrial engineering at the University of Michigan. He's been studying Japanese auto manufacturing, including NUMMI, since the 1980s, and wrote a book about it called The Toyota Way. He says even though Toyota was offering GM something quite remarkable-- to teach a competitor its secrets, to show them exactly how Toyota achieved such phenomenal reliability-- GM wasn't that interested.

Frank Langfitt

John Shook moved to Japan in the early 1980s because of his fascination with Japanese management techniques. He read books about them back home in east Tennessee. And he decided to fly halfway around the globe, learn to speak the language, and hunt for a job with the biggest Japanese company that would have him. Toyota hired him to train American workers in the joint venture.

Now, here was the problem that pushed Toyota into the deal. They needed to learn how to build cars in America. For years, the Japanese had been winning away customers from Detroit-- so many that now the US Congress was threatening to restrict car imports. Toyota could avoid that by making cars in the US.

But they wanted a partner. Here's John Shook.

Frank Langfitt

Toyota was right to be scared. Compared to Japan, where auto workers and management worked together, labor relations in America were more like war. And at the GM plant in Fremont, it felt at times like hand to hand combat.

A former running back from the University of Arkansas named Bruce Lee ran the western region for the United Auto Workers, and was in charge of the Fremont Union Local 1364. Now, normally, somebody like Bruce Lee is supposed to defend his union members no matter what, but even he says they were awful.

Frank Langfitt

Again, that's Jeffrey Liker, who has interviewed workers and management at Fremont for his research.

Frank Langfitt

That's Rick Madrid. He began working at the plant in 1955. He mounted tires on Chevy trucks.

Frank Langfitt

Peter Ross repaired machinery on the assembly line at GM.

Frank Langfitt

If you're wondering how people kept their jobs, well, back then, the UAW was still quite powerful. Under the union contract, it was almost impossible to fire anybody. And if management ticked off the union, workers could just shut the plant down in minutes.

With that sort of leverage, absenteeism became absurd. On a normal day, one out of five workers just didn't show up. It was even worse on Mondays. Billy Haggerty worked in hood and fender assembly. He says so few workers showed up some mornings, management couldn't start the line.

Frank Langfitt

Workers filed grievances, formal complaints against management, over all kinds of things. Someone who isn't your boss asks you to clean something up? Hit them with a grievance. A manager steps in to do a job that isn't his? Grievance.

The strategy was simple. Pile up grievances, real or imagined, by the thousands, then use them to squeeze money or concessions out of management. And Fremont workers struck back at their bosses in other ways. They'd intentionally screw up the vehicles, put Coke bottles or loose bolts inside the door panels so they'd rattle and annoy the customer. They'd scratch cars.

Richard Aguilar inspected vehicles at the plant. He saw one guy do something even worse.

Frank Langfitt

By 1982, GM had had enough, and put the Fremont factory out of its misery. The company laid off thousands of workers and closed the plant.

The next year, when GM and Toyota began planning to reopen the plant for the joint venture, there was one thing neither company wanted to do-- hire the same union leaders who'd battled management and overseen GM's worst workforce. Then the UAW's Bruce Lee sat down with Chairman Eiji Toyoda.

Frank Langfitt

GM was against it, but incredibly, Toyota agreed. Toyota execs believed their system would turn bad workers into good ones. Then Lee had to sell the plan to the rank and file. He held a meeting and told union members that Fremont would now be a Japanese style plant. Old seniority rules wouldn't apply. Life at the plant would be totally different. The workers hated all this.

Frank Langfitt

They even hung Lee in effigy. But Lee had something very powerful on his side. Most of the workers desperately needed jobs. And Lee had them.

When NUMMI opened, over 85% of the workforce were old hands from GM Fremont. But to prepare them for that moment, in the spring of 1984, Toyota started flying them to Japan in groups of 30 to begin learning the Toyota system for making cars.

Frank Langfitt

As the one American working in Toyota City, John Shook helped design this training.

Frank Langfitt

On one of those planes was Earl Ferguson. He'd been working for GM since 1964.

Frank Langfitt

Again, John Shook.

Frank Langfitt

The narrator in this Japanese public television program points out that the American worker is nine years older than his Toyota trainer. He also notes for his Japanese viewers that the Americans are so much larger than the Japanese, they waste a second or two more each time they get in and out of the vehicles they're building, which makes them 10% to 15% less productive than their Asian counterparts.

The key to the Toyota production system was a principle so basic it sounds like an empty management slogan. Teamwork. Back home in Fremont, GM supervisors ordered around large groups of workers. At the Takaoka plant, people were divided into teams of just four or five, switched jobs every few hours to relieve the monotony, and a team leader would step in to help whenever anything went wrong. Again, Professor Jeffrey Liker and Toyota's John Shook.

Frank Langfitt

So they'd make suggestions for a different kind of tool that would be better for the job, or a different place for bolts and parts to sit that would be easier to reach.

Frank Langfitt

Under the Toyota system, everyone's expected to be looking for ways to improve the production process all the time, to make the workers' job easier and more efficient, to shave extra steps and extra seconds off each worker's job. To spot defects in the cars and the causes of those defects. This is the Japanese concept of kaizen, continuous improvement. When a worker makes a suggestion that saves money, he gets a bonus of a few hundred dollars or so.

And if you look around the Toyota plant, you can see the result of all those improvements. Hanging shelves that travel along with the car and the worker, carrying the parts and bolts they need within easy reach. Special cushions they throw into the car frames when they have to kneel inside. Workers' tasks have been streamlined to the fewest possible steps, each step timed down to the second.

Frank Langfitt

Billy Haggerty learned the Japanese system two decades into his tenure at GM Fremont.

Frank Langfitt

All those mistakes added up at a GM plant, and the results were littered around the lots outside. Hundreds of misassembled cars. Cars that came off the line missing parts, cars that needed to be fixed before they could be shipped out to the dealers.

In a Toyota plant, there was nothing like this. Why did a GM plant produce so many screwed up cars? One cardinal rule that everybody in the company knew.

Frank Langfitt

Again, Billy Haggerty, Jeffrey Liker, Rick Madrid, and Bruce Lee.

Frank Langfitt

A long time GM manager named Ernie Schaefer explained why.

Frank Langfitt

John Shook, the American who helped Toyota design its training program, says this all goes back to the first assembly line created by Henry Ford.

Frank Langfitt

In his old GM job, Billy Haggerty put on hoods and fenders and saw lots of mistakes go right down the line.

Frank Langfitt

Workers told me they saw cars with engines put in backwards, cars without steering wheels or breaks. Some were so messed up they wouldn't start, and had to be towed off the line. Fixing them piled on more costs, and sometimes, taking them apart and putting them back together, workers damaged them even more.

On the floor of the NUMMI plant in Fremont, Earl Ferguson showed me Toyota's solution to all this. It's a thin nylon rope that hangs on hooks along the assembly line, which became a symbol of everything that was different about the Japanese way of making cars-- the andon cord.

Frank Langfitt

It also plays a surprisingly cheerful little song. Workers in each area can pick the tune. You hear it all the time in a Toyota plant.

The first pull doesn't stop the line. It summons team leaders to the location. They try to correct the problem, and usually, they can do it quickly without stopping production. But if they fail, the line stops.

Frank Langfitt

That's Rick Madrid, the worker who brought a thermos full of vodka and OJ to work every day at GM. What he saw in Japan was a kind of a bolt-- a cross bolt-- that they'd put in wrong.

Frank Langfitt

Again, that's industrial engineering professor Jeffrey Liker.

Frank Langfitt

Again, Earl Ferguson.

Frank Langfitt

Toyota trainer, John Shook.

Frank Langfitt

There's actually footage of this, though we don't know if it's the first group of Americans. The US workers are in kimonos with the Toyota name on them, and they hand their neck ties to the Japanese and hug. One man is crying.

Frank Langfitt

One of the Americans says, in Japanese, "Thanks to you all, we now feel confident for our success." John Shook.

Frank Langfitt

But if it was going to work, it would mean a radically different relationship between workers and management-- one where the managers trusted the workers to let them pull the andon cord and stop the line. One where the workers trusted their bosses enough to ask for help when there were problems.

Frank Langfitt

December 1984, the first car rolled off the assembly line in Fremont-- a yellow Chevy Nova. UAW rep Joel Smith was one of the speakers.

Frank Langfitt

Again, the UAW's Bruce Lee.

Frank Langfitt

The numbers coming out of the NUMMI plant were astonishing. Again, here's Jeffrey Liker.

Frank Langfitt

Maryann Keller, a long time car analyst, devotes a chapter to NUMMI in her book about the rise and fall of GM, Rude Awakening. After just three months, she says, the cars coming off the line were getting near perfect quality ratings. And just as important for GM were the cost savings.

One study suggested, remarkably, it would probably take 50% more workers under the old system to build the same car. Grievances and absenteeism plummeted, and lots of workers preferred the NUMMI teamwork system to the old combative one at GM. Several told us they enjoyed coming to work for the first time.

Frank Langfitt

That's Rick Madrid, who spent 17 years at the old Fremont plant building Chevy trucks. He was ashamed of that vehicle. At NUMMI, making the Nova, he felt differently.

Frank Langfitt

Another worker told me he'd go to the Chevy dealership to stare at the Novas. He didn't tell anyone he built them, or that he worked at NUMMI. He just liked seeing what the cars looked like, sitting there on the lot.

Ira Glass

That's NPR's Frank Langfitt. Coming up, so there's this great way of making cars. GM is using it in California, and not only are the cars more reliable, they're cheaper to make. Seems like a no brainer for GM. Start putting this way of producing cars into their other factories everywhere, and declare victory.

Why they didn't do that, why what happened at NUMMI stayed at NUMMI for so long-- that's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. If you're just tuning in, we're in the middle of a story about a car plant in Fremont, California called NUMMI. We now turn to the question, why was it so hard for GM to replicate NUMMI elsewhere in the company? Why didn't this idea spread decades ago?

In the first half of our story, we heard a lot from workers who were on the factory floor. In this half of the story, the action moves to their bosses-- the supervisors at GM-- who had a chance to turn the company around with what they learned at NUMMI. Again, here's NPR's Frank Langfitt.

Frank Langfitt

GM had gotten the first thing it wanted out of NUMMI-- a high quality small car. Now the question was, how could it spread the lessons of NUMMI throughout the rest of the company? To do that, it set up a special liaison office. Managers were flown in for tours and to work the assembly line for a few days to learn the team concept.

And from the beginning, GM executives sent 16 of their rising stars to help start NUMMI, with the idea that later, they'd come home and change the company. Two Wall Street Journal reporters later dubbed them the NUMMI commandos. One of the 16 was Mark Hogan. He says the top brass understood NUMMI's game changing potential, that a Toyota style plant squeezed many more cars out of far fewer workers.

Frank Langfitt

That's Steve Bera, another commando. He says once NUMMI was up and running, he and the other 15 waited to be deployed elsewhere for the next phase of their mission. But the company didn't seem to know what to do with them.

Frank Langfitt

Frustrated, Bera quit after just two years at NUMMI. With no master plan from Detroit, the first real attempt to do NUMMI again came from a factory manager, 400 miles south of Fremont, at a plant in Van Nuys. The factory was facing a possible shutdown. Its manager, a guy named Ernie Schaefer, had visited NUMMI, and he thought maybe he could save his plant if he adopted the Japanese system.

But he didn't have all the advantages Fremont had. This time, Toyota wasn't a partner in the experiment. GM had to transform Van Nuys on its own. Ernie Schaefer knew it was going to be tough.

Frank Langfitt

Van Nuys made Firebirds and Camaros, and its reputation wasn't much better than GM Fremont's had been-- defective cars coming off the line, battles with the union, sabotage. So Ernie Schaefer enlisted the same UAW leader who got the union on board at NUMMI, Bruce Lee, to help him win over the Van Nuys workforce. They shut down the plant for two weeks to train everyone in team concept and quality control.

For this workforce, there were no trips to Japan, no tearful sushi parties. And from the start, workers were skeptical.

Frank Langfitt

Larry Spiegel was another NUMMI commando. He moved down to Van Nuys to help launch the Japanese system there.

Frank Langfitt

This was one of the biggest differences between Fremont and Van Nuys. Van Nuys hadn't been shut down. Turns out it's a lot easier to get workers to change if they've lost their jobs, and then you offer them back. Without that, many union members just saw the Toyota system as a threat.

And they had a point. Under the Japanese system, Van Nuys stood to lose a fourth of its workforce, because the more efficient a plant becomes, the fewer workers it needs. And just as bad, the team concept hurt their seniority rights. This had been a problem for union members back at NUMMI also.

Frank Langfitt

Richard Aguilar worked at NUMMI, and to him, seniority was just another way of saying fairness. He waited 15 years to get enough seniority for the job he'd always wanted in the plant. Under the new system, management could just hire someone off the street for that job. The whole idea of seniority placing you into one great job for years was impossible under the team concept. Workers had to learn every job on their team and take turns doing those jobs.

Frank Langfitt

This was the other thing Richard hated about the Japanese system. The whole point of a union, its most basic principle, was to protect you from management. But once people were working in teams, Richard says union members started doing things for management that just seemed wrong.

Frank Langfitt

At Van Nuys, it wasn't just union members who resisted the Japanese system. Managers were against it too. Like the union members, they didn't want change. There were things they liked about the old system. It gave them privileges and perks they'd now be losing.

For instance, some managers opposed the idea of stopping the assembly line, because their bonuses depended on the number of cars that rolled off the line. Never mind how many defects they had. And now that workers and managers were supposed to be a team, executives and workers would share the same cafeteria and same parking lot, as equals. Managers at NUMMI didn't have a problem with that, but the managers at Van Nuys?

Frank Langfitt

The UAW's Bruce Lee remembers getting a phone call from plant supervisor Ernie Schaefer about his managers.

Frank Langfitt

So people fought the new system from both sides. Managers gave Ernie grief, and a dissident faction sprang up in the local union, which elected a staunch opponent of the Japanese system as their chairman. And as if that all wasn't enough, Ernie Schaefer ran into another obstacle. Workers could only build cars as good as the parts they were given. At NUMMI, many of the parts came from Japan and were really good. At Van Nuys, it was totally different.

Frank Langfitt

The team concept stressed continuous improvement. If a team got a shipment of parts that didn't fit, they'd alert their bosses, who'd then go to the suppliers to fix the problem. Sometimes they'd realize the problem was in the part's design, and Toyota engineers would go back to the drawing board and remake the part to address the problem workers were having on the assembly line. All the departments in the company worked together.

But Ernie's suppliers had never operated in a system like that. If he asked for fixes, they blew him off. And if he called Detroit and asked them to redesign a part that wasn't working, they'd ask him, why was he so special? They didn't have to change it for any other plant. Why should they change it for him?

Frank Langfitt

And if something didn't work, or was impossible to assemble, that was their problem.

Frank Langfitt

Schaefer says when he realized how much of the Japanese system happened off the factory floor, it answered something that had never quite made sense to him. Why had Toyota been so open with GM in showing its operations?

Frank Langfitt

Quality at Van Nuys didn't improve, and in 1992, GM shut the plant down for good, leaving 2,600 people without jobs. This is what the NUMMI commandos were up against. Entrenched, defensive bureaucracies and workers many of the places they turned. They were not only trying to change the biggest corporation in the world. They were trying to change a corporation that had been essentially a collection of individual car companies-- Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Buick-- each with its own design team, own leadership, and its own way of doing things.

Frank Langfitt

Dick Fuller was another commando. He ran the information technology division at NUMMI, which used some of the same streamlining concepts employed on the factory floor. He says when GM managers visited NUMMI, instead of trying to figure out how they could benefit from the system, some of them attacked it. Fuller remembers one IT manager who visited from a plant on the East Coast.

Frank Langfitt

Getting all these mini empires to embrace the kinds of radical changes that happened at NUMMI would have taken an almost Stalinesque leadership from above-- a combination of charisma and fury in the corner office. And NUMMI commando Mark Hogan says no one at GM fit that bill.

Frank Langfitt

Those exact numbers? GM went from 47% of the US market in the mid-1970s to 35% a decade later. One reason car execs were in denial was Detroit's insular culture. Yes, unions and management were always at each other's throats, and yes, GM and its suppliers had a destructive relationship that seemed to almost discourage quality. But everyone had settled into comfortable roles in this dysfunctional system and learned to live with it. And in the late 1980s, with their market share in freefall, Jeffrey Liker says they were more apt to blame others than themselves.

Frank Langfitt

If all of that wasn't enough to stymie attempts to learn from NUMMI, GM was distracted by other projects-- massive projects. It bought Ross Perot's company, Electronic Data Systems. It bought Hughes Aircraft for $5 billion. It decided the future was robotics. It decided the future was a massive, costly reorganization. It started Saturn, which produced cars that were better marketed than they were built.

Then came the 1991 recession. Car sales slumped. Again, Mark Hogan.

Frank Langfitt

It was the largest loss in American corporate history to that time-- $23.5 billion. GM's board of directors responded with what the press called a boardroom bloodbath, purging a long list of managers. Jack Smith took over as CEO. He was the executive who led the negotiations with Toyota to create NUMMI.

He saw NUMMI as a way forward for GM. Mark Hogan and some of the other commandos felt they finally had a champion.

Frank Langfitt

Rapidly by GM standards, which wasn't nearly rapidly enough. Jack Smith declined to talk to me for this story, but he told a reporter a few years ago, "I just wish it had happened a lot faster than it did." Pick your nautical cliche. Reforming General Motors was like turning around a battleship, one manager said. Another compared it to steering the Titanic with a canoe paddle. Jeffrey Liker says the cultural gap between NUMMI and the rest of GM was so vast that even with clear marching orders to change, some of the people running the company didn't know where to begin.

Frank Langfitt

The first round of changes put andon cords and Japanese-style inventory control into the GM plants, but there was no change in the culture. Workers and managers continued their old antagonistic ways. In some of the factories where they installed the andon cord, workers got yelled at when they pulled it. A few plants even cut the cords down.

So the second round of changes included some team concepts. They put together a book explaining how each plant should run and the reasoning behind it. Jeff Weller was one of the people dispatched in the 1990s to convert the company plant by plant. Weller says some factory managers were receptive, but in the sprawling, decentralized system, the plant manager was still king, and ran the factory the way he wanted.

Frank Langfitt

Lots of people in GM still didn't see the need to change. By the late 1990s, the company was posting huge profits selling trucks and SUVs, which made the loss in market share seem less urgent. To make real progress, managers had to leave the United States. One overhauled GM Germany.

Mark Hogan took over GM Brazil in 1994 to enact NUMMI principles there. In Brazil, he had a big, unionized workforce, but he could avoid GM's bureaucracy, its supplier network, and the United Auto Workers.

Frank Langfitt

But in America, everyone I talked to said it took about a decade and a half after NUMMI for change to even begin to take hold at GM. By the year 2000, GM finally started to see a generational transformation. Jeffrey Liker says so many managers had come through NUMMI for training for a day or a week or a year.

Frank Langfitt

By the early 2000s, GM had developed a production model with the UAW based on Japanese principles that would go into all of its plants. It was called the Global Manufacturing System. And although GM quality still lags behind the imports, it's improved a lot. Again, Jeffrey Liker.

I did my interview with Jeffrey Liker at the 2010 Detroit Auto Show, and we walked over to the GM exhibit, to the Cadillac SRX, which is a small SUV. Jeffrey pointed to the gap between the doors and the car frame, which is supposed to be uniform.

Frank Langfitt

Precision in all these details makes for a better-looking, more reliable car, where things work like they're supposed to. But this improvement didn't come soon enough. Some cars and some plants improved less quickly than others. And while GM was getting better, so were its competitors, leaving it still near the back of the pack.

Frank Langfitt

That's James Womack, co-author of a seminal book comparing the Toyota and GM production systems, The Machine That Changed the World.

Frank Langfitt

In the end, what did them in was the 2008 recession. It destroyed the car market. The next year, General Motors became the largest industrial bankruptcy in US history. Its bailout cost taxpayers more than $50 billion. I asked Mark Hogan, the NUMMI commando who went on to run GM's small car division in North America, if GM had adopted NUMMI earlier, could it have really changed all that?

Frank Langfitt

Again, the UAW's Bruce Lee.

Frank Langfitt

Of course, quality and reliability weren't the only problems that brought GM down. Executives made other big mistakes. Over the years, General Motors negotiated contracts with the UAW with such generous health care coverage that by 2007, it amounted to more than $1,600 for each vehicle GM produced in North America. And initially, some GM executives dismissed hybrid cars like the Prius as a publicity stunt. Instead, they bet the company on SUVs and trucks, only to see sales crash when gas hit $4.00 a gallon.

Over the last decade, as GM became more like Toyota, Toyota became a little bit like GM. In 2008, it took over the title from GM of the world's largest automaker. But Toyota executives now say the company did this by making one of GM's old mistakes-- stressing quantity over quality.

Akio Toyoda is the company CEO. He's the grandson of the founder, and cut his teeth at NUMMI. At a congressional hearing in 2010 about Toyota's sudden acceleration problems, he said the company's fatal mistake was growing too fast.

Frank Langfitt

It was 15 years before GM took the lessons of NUMMI seriously, and it spent the next 10 years slowly implementing what it learned. And all the time, the NUMMI plant kept pumping out vehicles-- 6,000 a week on average, two shifts a day. Toyota got what it wanted out of the deal. A year after starting NUMMI, it began opening other factories around the US, using what it had learned in Fremont.

GM and Toyota continued to run NUMMI together until 2009, when GM went bankrupt and pulled out, leaving Toyota to run the plant alone. Toyota decided to shut the factory down. It was their only unionized plant in the United States.

In April 2010, NUMMI produced its very last car-- a Corolla. 4,500 people lost their jobs. This is the first factory Toyota has shut down since it was founded 73 years ago.

Frank Langfitt

One last time, that's John Shook, the first American Toyota hired for NUMMI.

Frank Langfitt

Rick Madrid retired from the assembly line in 1992.

Frank Langfitt

That's Billy Haggerty, who ended up putting in 18 years at NUMMI without a vacation day. He says just the other day he saw one.

Frank Langfitt

This is also NUMMI's legacy. In the end, it's not just a symbol for so many things that went wrong with GM. It's also a really good car plant. One that turned out nearly 8 million high-quality cars and trucks.

Ira Glass

Frank Langfitt. When we first ran this story back in 2010, Frank was NPR's automotive correspondent. He's now their international correspondent based in Shanghai. Since 2010, the NUMMI plant in Fremont has become symbolic of what's happening in the American car industry in a different way. It's now where they make the Tesla.

[MUSIC - "TOYOTA COROLLA," THE TURN UPS]

Ira Glass

Frank Langfitt's story about NUMMI was produced by me and Brian Reed. NPR's Uri Berliner helped us edit it. Our show today was produced by Lisa Pollak, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Robyn Semien, Alyssa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Production help from Simon Adler and Lilly Sullivan.

Seth Lind is our operations director. Emily Condon's our production manager. Elise Bergerson's our business manager. Kimberly Henderson is our office coordinator. Old Japanese TV footage in today's show comes from NHK in Tokyo. Thanks to [INAUDIBLE], who translated it for us.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Since we first broadcast this story in 2010, a number of the people who Frank interviewed have since died, including Rick Madrid, the guy who would go around putting postcards in the windshields of old Chevy Novas. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Since we first broadcast this story in 2010, a number of the people who Frank interviewed have since died, including Rick Madrid the guy who would go around putting postcards in the windshields of old Chevy Novas. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

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Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.