Ford's Famous Rouge Assembly Plant Tour Will Start Up Again Next Spring
A staple of visiting Detroit used to be tours of the Motor City's automotive assembly plants, but in the last two decades, the public had few, if any, glimpses at how cars are made.
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| Ford Motor Company is about to revive its once popular Rouge River factory tours. (Photo: Ford Motor Company) |
Now, as Ford Motor Company prepares to open its new 2.5-million square foot Dearborn Truck Plant in spring 2004 to build the next generation F-150 pickup truck, it is about to revive its once popular Rouge River factory tours. These tours will allow visitors to not only see the assembly of F-150s, the automaker's most popular model, but also learn of the environmental innovations that Ford made to transform the 80-year-old icon of 20th century mass production into a 21st century image for "sustainable development."
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| Tours of the Rouge River factory took place from 1924 till 1980, when they were stopped due to cost cutting measures. (Photo: Ford Motor Company) |
For instance, the grass roof atop the new truck plant is expected to be a tourist attraction in and of itself, according to Timothy O'Brien, Ford vice president, Real Estate. For example, the Guinness Book of World Records has certified that the factory has the world's largest living roof at 10.4 acres.
Ford held tours of its Rouge River factory complex from 1924 to 1980, only interrupted by World War II. Annually, about 250,000 visitors came to see how raw materials came in by freighter and railroad, to the vast steel foundries, and were then turned into finished cars.
The effort to cut costs during the 1980 recession, plus the growing obsolescence of the Rouge facility, and quite possibly safety concerns, forced Ford to pull the plug on the tours. Yet, during the past 20 years the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce reported that auto factory tours were the top request of the area's 16.9 million annual visitors.