I grew up pretty close to NUMMI, and heard a lot about it in the news in both good times and the eventual bad times. My first car at 16 was a Pontiac Vibe, a GM

I grew up pretty close to NUMMI, and heard a lot about it in the news in both good times and the eventual bad times. My first car at 16 was a Pontiac Vibe, a GM rebrand of the Toyota Matrix (which in turn was a hatchback variant of the Corolla), all of which were built at NUMMI. It was kind of cool knowing that the car I was driving was built just a few freeway exits over. 10 years later, I totaled it and despite being a lot better off financially than I was at 16, I decided to buy another one. It's just such a solid car, maintenance is easy on it, etc. It's sad to me that there aren't more of the solid, low-tech, low-cost cars that NUMMI was so great at churning out. Maybe one day Tesla can get electric cars to that type of economy of scale, but I think it's going to be a while.