AM General in Mishawaka: The Humvee Works on McKinley Highway

AM General · The Humvee Works on McKinley Highway

AM General is Mishawaka's defining industrial fact. The company that builds the Humvee — and now the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle that succeeds it — has run its assembly plants on the city's east side, along McKinley Highway, for more than half a century: first in a borrowed building that had made components for Studebaker, where it built truck beds and then transit buses in the 1970s, and from 1984 in the plant remade for the Humvee, the vehicle that made the works famous on every battlefield and television screen of the 1990s. For one decade the Mishawaka plants also built the most conspicuous civilian vehicles in America: the Hummer H1 in the military plant and, from 2002, the H2 in a second plant built for it under General Motors' ownership of the Hummer brand. The brand died in 2010; the military line never stopped. What followed at the commercial plant — a wheelchair-accessible van, a Mercedes-Benz built under contract, and two electric-vehicle ventures that between them produced one start-up run of vans — is told here at exactly the strength the record carries it, announced kept separate from accomplished. The company itself descends from the government-products business of Kaiser-Jeep, taken into American Motors in 1970 and incorporated as AM General in 1971; its headquarters sits in South Bend, and that side of the company prints as boundary here. What follows is the whole arc at the size the Mishawaka record carries: the descent, the building, the buses, the Humvee, the GM chapter whole, the after-GM course, the contracts, the workforce, and the works today.