GM Heritage Center

[GrandCircus289]

I was reading an article earlier today about General Motors celebrating 75 years of producing the Suburban - the longest running nameplate in the business. GM allowed some journalists to drive some of the older generation models. The article said that some of the models came from the GM Heritage Center. I hadn't heard of this place so I googled it and found out that its located in Sterling Heights and has somewhere between 600-800 models. However, this place is not open to the public. I was just wondering if anybody on this forum has had the opportunity to take a tour? If so, what did you think of it?

[Fiddler]

I was there last week. Its usually only open for groups like
car clubs. Every once in awhile its open to the public.
There is about a 100 cars on display but they have have more
that are stored elsewhere that get rotated to the display building.
The place is kinda dark so the pictures look like hell.

[BagAJellyDonuts]

Been there, it's not a public museum. That said, you are on your honor to respect the cars. In other words, no barriers but don't even think about bringing a screaming kid that wants to steal the knobs off the radio. And don't touch the cars.

I used to drive a delivery truck around the area. Long time ago, I had to make a delivery to GM Photographic over by the old GM building. Turns out it was a warehouse just full of one offs and concepts. The guy I talked to told me many of the things would be scrapped but some interesting things would be hidden from the powers that be. Accountants don't understand how something can be gained from seeing somebody else's imagination.

If you like this sort of stuff, the Chrysler museum is about the best thing that really is open to the public. These days, doubt anything like it could be built. It's a shame because there is a lot of quiet interest in these things.

[Packman41]

I've been there several times, but not in the past few years. Whenever I've been there it was with local car clubs like the Classic Car Club or the Cadillac/LaSalle Club and was not open to the general public.

It is not a museum, rather it is a storage facility for the GM collection of cars. The vast majority were not very special, just a typical production car with maybe a special paint scheme or some interior trim. No wonder GM auctioned off a number of these cars earlier this year. And I would be surprised if they ever had 800 cars in storage. However, some of the cars are VERY special and would make a great display of Detroit's automotive heritage.

[JBMcB]

GM keeps a couple samples of every vehicle they build, if for no other reason than for insurance purposes [[someone claiming a design defect on an old model caused an explosion or something, they have a pristine reference to check.) Some are rare, but they are all in mint/factory condition.

When I was there last [[a couple years ago) they had a sample of the first production run of every model of corvette built, along with a bunch of concept models. It took up most of the main floor. They had one-offs built for movies, a crazy show-truck built for a 40's/50's era worlds fair, a couple of run-of-the-mill 80's sedans with crazy experimental IPs. It's an interesting place.