GM's North American production shift focuses on profitable SUVs and trucks
General Motors is overhauling its plants, prioritizing high-margin models like full-size SUVs and pickups, leading to uneven capacity use across facilities.
General Motors is undergoing a major overhaul of its North American production network. The company is investing hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade its plants while simultaneously reevaluating which models and volumes make sense to produce domestically. Against a backdrop of shifting demand and realigned model lineups, the situation across assembly sites is highly uneven.
GM's plant in Arlington, Texas, continues to operate at near capacity. Annual production there approaches 400,000 vehicles, focusing on the automaker's most profitable models—full-size SUVs. In fact, the strain on this facility is a key reason behind the decision to move Cadillac Escalade production to the Orion plant in the coming years. This move should free up capacity to increase output of the Chevrolet Tahoe, Suburban, and GMC Yukon, which remain in consistently high demand.
A similar pattern is seen at other critical facilities. The Fort Wayne Assembly plant, which builds the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and GMC Sierra 1500, is also running at full tilt. Once pickup production ramps up at Orion, the load on Fort Wayne is expected to ease slightly, but in the short term, the plant remains completely maxed out.
The Lansing Delta Township plant is similarly operating without any spare capacity. Additional volume here came from shifting production of the GMC Acadia, allowing the site to fully utilize its potential.
Overall, the current state of GM's plants reflects a strategic shift: priority is given to high-margin models with steady demand, while less popular segments and electric vehicles are being redistributed among facilities or even phased out of local production. This imbalance, analysts note, is likely to persist at least until the end of the decade.
In practice, General Motors acknowledges that the era of evenly balanced plant utilization is over. The company is betting on its most profitable models and flexibly reallocating production, even if it means idle capacity at some sites. This approach boosts efficiency in the short term, but it also makes GM's strategy more vulnerable to sudden shifts in demand.