The Future of NUMMI

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New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI) is one of those mytho-poetic phenomena in the U.S. manufacturing sector: a car plant, developed as a cooperative venture between General Motors (MTLQQ) and Toyota, located in Northern California (read: not the decaying industrial heartland). It’s been around since the 1980s, but now GM and Toyota are unwinding their partnership; GM has backed out completely, and Toyota wants to close the plant by 2010.

Which means...California is about to have an idle, influential manufacturing facility (NUMMI was conceived so that GM could learn “lean” manufacturing techniques), plus 4,700 unemployed workers. Given the substantial number of electric-vehicle startups in the Golden State, companies that are barely out of the literal garage stage, NUMMI’s assembly lines and skilled labor force should look like Nirvana. For example, why should Tesla, whose financials are perpetually shaky, build a new plant to assemble electric cars if it can instead make them at...NUMMI? Likewise other startups, such as Aptera and Fisker. Well, I guess their is the small matter of industrial espionage and trade secrets, but if we’re going to move toward an electric-car future, we’re going to need places to build them. So maybe the EV startups can agree to share...

Another options would be to continue retraining the NUMMI workforce to shift the plant from building cars to building other forms of transportation. California is supposed to be expanding its light-rail system in coming years. Is NUMMI a good place to build trains? Who knows, but it should be a good place to build something. Allowing the mindshare it commands to fade away, and to allow its workforce to be dispersed, is short-sighted.

UPDATE: Well, an annoying snafu at the Shifting Gears control board on this fine Friday. A reader pointed out that NUMMI is actually in Northern California, not SoCal as I originally wrote. Which is of course true: NUMMI is in Fremont. Sorry for the error, now corrected.