GM Announces $175 Million Diesel Truck Engine Component Plant in Ohio
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The Dayton, Ohio, area will soon be home to a new General Motors plant.
Construction on the 251,000-square-foot, $175 million complex has already started in Brookville, Ohio. The GM-DMAX plant will have more than 100 employees making components for Duramax diesel truck engines when construction is complete by the end of 2020.
To help meet demand for the @chevrolet #Silverado and @GMC Sierra, we’re happy to announce a new $175M facility to be built in Brookville, OH. These 100 new jobs will help deliver components to our DMAX engine plant starting in late 2020. #USManufacturing https://t.co/Hk0YO9S3yq pic.twitter.com/7PXFDbbbUq
— General Motors Manufacturing (@MFG_GM) November 21, 2019
The new plant will operate concurrently with the original DMAX plant in Moraine, Ohio, sending the established plant machine engine components for assembly there.
Then from Moraine, finished diesel engines will go to a GM Flint, Mich., plant, where the engines will be built into the new Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra HDs.
From Flint, the newly assembled trucks will go to dealers across the nation.
DMAX in Moraine will continue to have more than 800 workers.
The Moraine DMAX plant has been running “flat out” for years to meet growing demand for its chief product — the Duramax engine, Gerald Johnson, GM’s executive vice president of global manufacturing, said at a press conference Nov. 21 at a Brookville fire station.
“Strong demand for GM’s all-new family of Chevrolet and GMC heavy- and medium-duty pickups is driving us to find ways to build more Duramax diesel engines,” Johnson said. “The Brookville investment will enable us to machine more engine blocks and heads and ultimately enable our DMAX engine plant in Moraine to build more 6.6-liter diesel engines for our Flint truck assembly plant.”
Employees install lower head covers onto Duramax diesel engines at the DMAX plant in Moraine, Ohio, in 2010. (Skip Peterson for DMAX)
Since 1998, DMAX has been a 60-40 joint venture of GM and Isuzu, with GM being the majority owner. The Moraine plant has built more than 2 million engines since 1999.
“This will ensure that we meet great customer demand,” said Jay Niijima, executive officer and division sales executive with Isuzu Motors.
DMAX and GM continue to benefit from America’s love affair with the pickup truck.
In Ohio, GM has more than 4,800 employees, 212 dealerships and 880 suppliers. The automaker has invested more than $2 billion in the Buckeye State in the last decade.
Still, GM and Ohio have had a challenging year. Last November, GM first announced it would idle its Lordstown assembly plant, where it had built the Chevrolet Cruze compact car.
Earlier this month, the automaker said it sold the 6.2 million-square-foot Lordstown plant to an investment group called Lordstown Motors, which is backed by electric truck maker Workhorse Group, which is itself based in Loveland.
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