The Humvee: a claim tested — designed by AM General, built in Mishawaka

1979–1985 · THE DESIGNING WAS THE COMPANY'S OWN; THE ROOM WAS NOT HERE

The claim and the record: No vehicle is more completely Mishawaka's in the world's mind than the Humvee, and the claim in its strong form — that the Humvee was designed or invented in Mishawaka — is the one this entry tests. The AM General file of this history establishes the first half of the truth: the Humvee was genuinely the company's own design, the first vehicle AM General and its predecessors had designed themselves rather than building to another firm's drawings, with preliminary design work begun in July 1979 and the prototype contracts of July 1981. The second half is geography, and the company's own corporate record settles it. In 1979 AM General's headquarters sat in the American Motors AMTEK Building in the Detroit suburbs; the headquarters moved to Livonia, Michigan, in 1984, and to South Bend in 1986 — and the company's engineering stayed in Livonia, where its Engineering and Product Development Center stands on Hubbard Road to this day. The design work of 1979–83 was done inside that Michigan organization; no record reached for this section places the Humvee's drawing boards in Mishawaka, and the plant that made the vehicle famous did not yet exist when the design was drawn — AM General built the factory at 13200 McKinley Highway in 1984, production began there in the fall of that year, and the first production HMMWV rolled off the Mishawaka line on 2 January 1985. Mishawaka's share, printed at its full and honest size, is the manufacture: every production Humvee, the civilian Hummers of the GM chapter, and the JLTV work of the plant's later course came off Mishawaka lines, and the AM General file carries that record whole. The same discipline governs the plant's other famous builds: the MV-1, the only American vehicle designed from the ground up for wheelchair passengers, was the Vehicle Production Group's design — a Florida-founded, Michigan-seated startup's paper — and Mishawaka's share in it, 2011 to 2016, was again the building. A city that manufactured the vehicles the world knows by sight does not need the designing too, and this section does not take it.

Sources:

1. The AM General company history (the company's own corporate history, as carried in the AM General file) — headquarters in the AMTEK Building until 1984, then Livonia, Michigan, then South Bend in 1986; the Engineering and Product Development Center at 12200 Hubbard Road, Livonia, Michigan; production of the HMMWV at the Mishawaka plant from the fall of 1984.
2. The Humvee reference history (ltw.net company history) — corporate offices moved to the South Bend manufacturing facility in 1986 "while Engineering remained in Livonia."
3. The AM General file of this history (banked) — preliminary design begun July 1979; the July 1981 prototype contracts; the specialist history's point that everything the company had built before was to other firms' designs; the 1983 contract; the McKinley Highway plant remade for the Humvee; the MV-1 as the Vehicle Production Group's vehicle, built at the Commercial Assembly Plant from 21 September 2011.
4. The reference record of the HMMWV program (Wikipedia's AM General and HMMWV accounts, checked against the company history) — the factory built at 13200 McKinley Highway, Mishawaka, in 1984; production begun in the fall of 1984; first deliveries in early 1985.