The second industrial age: the contract truck plant

1969–2027

The system changed its product a third time, and changed its nature with it: The third life began, as the second had, in an existing building repurposed: the components plant Rockwell built on McKinley Highway, taken by Kaiser-Jeep for truck beds in 1969 and converted by AM General to bus assembly in 1974, was converted again — and expanded, the tellings differing on "built" against "converted" and printed both ways in the AM General section — for the vehicle the company had designed and the Army had bought on 22 March 1983, a five-year, $1.2 billion contract for 55,000 vehicles. Production of the HMMWV began at Mishawaka in the fall of 1984 on the company narrative, the reference production line reading "Produced 2 January 1985 – present," and every production military Humvee since has been built in that building. The systemic novelty was the business form. The first life's works had owned their ore ground, their dam, their product and their name; the second life's works, after 1922, owned their plant and their process but sold inside a parent's system; the third life's works owns chiefly its capacity. Under the agreements of 21 December 1999, General Motors took exclusive worldwide ownership of the HUMMER brand and its intellectual property and all marketing and distribution, while AM General kept the plants and built the trucks — the H1 beside the Humvees in Plant 1, and the H2 in a second, purpose-built plant the deal obliged it to construct at 12900 McKinley Highway: 673,000 square feet in the reference works, 675,000 in the company's own later releases, both printed as they stand. The commercial plant then ran the purest form of the contract system: one customer, one model, no second line of work — and, after the H2's production ended in January 2009, a succession of other people's vehicles: the MV-1 wheelchair-accessible vehicle, Mercedes-Benz's R-Class — the only contract manufacturing Mercedes has done in the United States, on the company's account — and two electric-vehicle ventures, until the plant passed in June 2025 to GEM, its present use undocumented in the record reached, as the AM General section prints it. The military line, meanwhile, never stopped: Plant 1 builds the HMMWV still, and Plant 2 — the JLTV A2, won in the 2023 recompete — runs in a contested ramp the AM General section prints in both tellings, the company's deliveries-since-late-2025 against the congressional record's two-years-behind. What the second age proves about the system is the obverse of the first: Mishawaka's constant is not ownership, product or power source but a transferable capacity — casting, machining, assembling, finishing — held in a workforce and a plant that successive owners and customers have rented, bought and redirected for a century and a half. The AM General section carries the marque's whole record; here the plant stands as the industrial system's present form: a defense campus of 96 acres with a test track, building two military vehicles, on ground a components maker graded in 1969.

Sources:

1. Humvee reference history and Army contract record; U.S. Government Accountability Office, NSIAD-84-136 (12 June 1984) — the 22 March 1983 award, $1.2 billion, 55,000 vehicles; the premature-production conclusion; as the AM General section carries them.
2. AM General reference history and Hummer production-facilities lists; Military Trader (Doyle), "The Birth of AM General" — the 1984 plant at 13200 McKinley Highway, the building's conversions from truck beds to buses to HMMWVs, and the two tellings of the production start.
3. General Motors / AM General agreements of 21 December 1999, as carried in the Hummer marque record and SEC-filed summaries — the brand transfer, AM General's exclusive production rights and new-facility commitment; AM General press release, 5 September 2013 — the Commercial Assembly Plant at 675,000 square feet, against the reference works' 673,000.
4. U.S. Army / AM General JLTV releases, 2023 — the 96-acre Mishawaka Manufacturing Campus and its test track.
5. This build's AM General section — the marque's and the plants' whole record, including the commercial plant's course through the MV-1, the R-Class, the electric ventures and the passage to GEM in June 2025; cross-referenced and not retold.