Sweet is in the eye of the beholder. It makes me both smile and wax nostalgically sad. I grew up in the shadow of GM's Fremont assembly plant (now Tesla's home base), where my step-dad was a low-level production manager on the truck line until the plant was shut down in 1982. We periodically got to go to employee-family tours and see the assembly process that was then state-of-the-art. No robots, no self-guided delivery vehicles. Lots and lots of workers running spot welders, air wrenches, or paint sprayers, or coordinating chain-driven mechanical parts delivery lines bringing in doors, body sub-assemblies, engines, etc. A bee-hive of human activity and noisy, jerky, conveyor lines. But it put bread on the table for a whole lot of us and a measure of pride about how, even with such relatively primitive processes, our dads assembled one car or truck that rolled off the line, started up, and drove off to inspection every 90 seconds.
Makes me wonder what the current kids of Orion, Hamtramck, and other GM assembly plants will be nostalgic about in 50 years.
