Since January 2017, General Motors has built three generations of self-driving test vehicles. The company's Orion Assembly plant in Michigan is responsible for assembling more than 200 of the Cruise AV test vehicles that have been spotted in test hubs such as downtown San Francisco.
The company recently announced that it is going to invest more than $100 million to upgrade the Orion plant as well as the Brownstown Battery plant in Michigan. The money will help the facilities gear up to build Cruise AV production models.
While Orion will be responsible for most of the self-driving cars' structural components, the Brownstown plant will be responsible for putting together the rooftop modules that use 5 LIDAR units, 21 radar sensors, 16 cameras, and other hardware to drive the vehicle. If you notice from the photos provided by GM, assembly at the Orion plant will be slightly different from traditional models as the autonomous cars don't require automotive staples like a gas pedal or even a steering wheel.
Production of the rooftop modules is already underway in Brownstown, and production of the fourth generation of the Cruise AV is scheduled to begin in 2019. According to Popular Science, the autonomous vehicles will join a fleet of Uber's autonomous taxis the same year. The Cruise will also include an emergency stop button, but it won't simply jam on the brakes — it will wait for the right time to pull over safely.
The Brownstown plant has a smaller workforce, only about 116 hourly and salaried employees who typically assemble lithium-ion batteries for GM's hybrid and electric vehicles. The Orion plant is nearly ten times the size of the GM subsidiary to the south. The Orion facility has 4.3 million square feet and employs 1,000 people, mostly hourly employees. The Orion facility will continue to build the Chevy Bolt EV and Sonic as it prepares for the Cruise AV production.