We’ve seen plenty of video tours of barns full of abandoned cars, but it’s not often we get tours of whole automotive factories. Pininfarina constructed this plant to build bodies for the Cadillac Allanté starting in 1986, and went on to build various cars there up until 2011. Now, it sits unoccupied.
The Allanté had an odd assembly process. Pininfarina made the vehicle’s bodies in this plant in Italy before mounting them to special cradles and shipping them to Detroit using Boeing 747s. The rest of the production took place at the Hamtramck assembly plant, where EVs like the Hummer and Silverado are currently built.
After the Cadillac went out of production, the site briefly produced the Ferrari Testarossa and then the Peugeot 406 Coupe. Pininfarina also built the Alfa Romeo Brera and Spider there shutting down the site in 2011.
The video shows Brera test cars that were left on the grounds as late as 2015. Some of them still wore the camouflage used for development purposes. These vehicles have since been taken away, though.
The factory floor looks remarkably good for being closed for over a decade. The machines for the assembly line are still there and appear ready to transport vehicles again. Several robots are still there, too. Amazingly, some of the diagrams for how to build the Brera are still at their respective stations.
The office at the site is a complete mess, though. Looters seemed to have stripped the building of copper and stole the bottoms off the chairs in the lunch room. There’s also graffiti on some of the walls. It’s a surreal and sad sight.
Outside, the test track is still partially visible, but nature is rapidly taking back the space. Grass is growing through cracks in the asphalt, and trees are sprouting in some areas. In this site’s heydey, there were spots for evaluating a vehicle’s suspension and going through deep water.
Pininfarina shut down the plant for a variety of reasons. After the 2008 financial crisis, building small-run vehicles became a tougher business case, which was this site’s specialty. Mahindra acquiring the company in 2015 likely didn’t help, either. According to the video, the factory shows no signs of a resurgence in production — a damn shame considering its quirky history.
