Trans-formation

General Motors Corp.'s new Ypsilanti Transmission Operations (YTO) facility, housed within the mammoth 5 million-sq.-ft. (495,000-sq.-m) Willow Run plant in southeast Michigan, is clean, bright and modern — both in looks and how it operates.

It took two and a half years and $450 million to retool the 1 million-sq.-ft. (92,000-sq.-m) area of Willow Run to create YTO, which will produce the new 6L80 6-speed automatic transmission that will be used in rear-drive cars and trucks.

The plant currently is equipped to produce 500 of the transmissions daily on one shift, but that will rise to 1,500 units per day within the next two years.

YTO machines parts and produces several subassemblies, including gears and shafts, transmission cases, bellhousings, valve bodies and clutches, that are fed into the final clean-room assembly operation.

Raw materials come in one end of the plant to feed the machining and subassembly lines.

Finished transmissions are transported to an adjacent loading dock for shipping, initially to plants in Michigan, Texas and Kentucky.

Quality check stations are located throughout the line, and each transmission goes through a 4-minute hot test to ensure it shifts properly, noise requirements are met and there are no leaks. Transmissions that fail the test are torn down.