Sterling Heights: from missiles to Ram trucks

Sterling Heights, Michigan’s fourth-largest city, is a car-making town: today its big Stellantis plant builds the Ram 1500, one of America’s best-selling pickup trucks. But the factory started life doing something very different. When it opened in 1953, it was a missile plant. Back then, with Chrysler running it for the U.S. Army, the plant built Redstone and Jupiter rockets — early American missiles from the same family that helped launch the country’s first satellite and first astronaut into space. It didn’t become a car factory until 1980 (briefly under Volkswagen), and Chrysler bought it in 1983 to start building cars like the Dodge Shadow and, later, the Chrysler 200. The plant has had a real rags-to-riches story: after the 2009 financial crisis, Chrysler announced it would close for good — but it was saved at the last minute, given hundreds of millions of dollars in upgrades, and retooled. In 2018 it began building the Ram 1500, and it’s been going strong ever since, recently rolling out its two-millionth truck.