600 Corvette Drive in Bowling Green, Kentucky is the home of Chevrolet’s halo sports car. Opened in 1981, the Corvette-building facility employs 753 hourly and 121 salaried workers at the present moment. Due to the rising demand of cars painted Torch Red, Shark Grey Metallic, and Laguna Blue Tintcoat, the Corvette factory is preparing for an update worth $439 million.
According to the golden bowtie, the money will go into an all-new, state-of-the-art paint shop. Slated to begin construction this summer and be finished in two years’ time, General Motors’ move will retain 150 jobs at the Bowling Green facility. It will also add 450,000 square-foot of paint shop to the complex, almost half the size of the C7 Corvette production facility.
This investment comes after GM invested $135 million in Bowling Green, Kentucky over the last four years. “The Corvette is one of Kentucky’s most-cherished icons,” declared Lt. Gov. Crit Luallen. “Such a significant expansion of the Bowling Green Assembly Plant will help the company remain competitive in the region and around the world.” Are you curious why a new paint shop costs just a smudge under half a billion bucks?
If you ignore the cost of the land and expenses on the construction materials, tooling and the paint robots are not coming cheap. Furthermore, Chevrolet tells that the paint shop is going to be environmental and efficiency-focused. Other important enhancements include:
* Dry Scrubber Booth Technology with Limestone Handling System designed to eliminate sludge water and waste;
* Light-emitting diode, or LED, lighting for process decks for improved visual inspection as well as energy savings;
* State-of-the-art FANUC robots with Versa-bell 3 electrostatic applicators for an extremely smooth finish and maximum transfer efficiency, saving 25 percent of the paint material used, which also benefits the environment;
* Longer, high-efficiency baking ovens for exceptional paint finish and lower energy use.
Approximately 38,000 units of the seventh-generation Corvette have been sold in 2014 on a global level.
After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well. Full profile
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