Biography | Mary Barra — The Poletown Plant She Took in 2003

A future chief executive is easy to file as someone who never left the tower. In 2003 she came here to run an assembly plant. CNN's timeline and her later public remarks both place her as plant manager of Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly that year. WardsAuto, reviewing a 2015 biography, puts about 3,400 people on the payroll when she arrived. Business Insider, writing at her appointment, says the assignment included the launch of the Cadillac DTS and Buick LeSabre. She had not run a production department, the usual farm team for this job. The plant itself was already a charged site. Opened by GM in 1985 on land assembled through the Poletown condemnation, it sat on the Detroit-Hamtramck line at what is now 2500 East Grand Boulevard. A visitor in 2003 would have seen a conventional assembly works, not the electric-vehicle plant later branded Factory Zero. GM began converting the site for battery-electric production around 2020 and took the Factory Zero name in that rebuild. The first vehicle off the new line, a GMC Hummer EV, was dated 17 December 2021. The 2021 photograph attached is that later factory, with a White House photographer on site, not a 2003 production still. The pin is the same grounds. The job lasted into 2004, after which she moved to vehicle manufacturing engineering and, later, human resources during the bankruptcy years. She has called the plant assignment a reroute. The portrait is a 2014 United States government photograph. Photo: plant, The White House, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: U.S. government, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.