After 52 years of cranking out some-more than 16 million new vehicles, a General Motors public Plant in Lordstown, Ohio, is shutting down.

The final Chevy Cruze rolled off a line during about 2 p.m. Wednesday — a white sedan headed to a dealership in Florida — withdrawal thousands of workers to start building new lives as retirees or in new jobs, many in new cities.

This is a latest pierce by a new GM to equivocate a mistakes that helped expostulate it into failure a decade ago. Back then, a automaker waited too prolonged to cut production, tighten plants and adjust to fast changes in a automobile industry. This time is different.

As Americans have gravitated to trucks and SUVs and incited divided from cars, GM CEO Mary Barra is adjusting a automaker’s footprint by finale prolongation during 5 plants in a U.S. and Canada and slicing 14,000 jobs. Lordstown is a initial plant to tighten underneath this new plan. Not a large warn given a plant usually done a slow-selling Cruze sedan and GM is looking to strew some of a company’s new capacity.

“At a finish of a day, Mary Barra is doing what’s best for GM,” pronounced Jeff Schuster, researcher during LMC Automotive. Schuster marks a ability function rates of automakers, a factory’s intensity capability contra what it’s indeed producing. The aloft a rate, a better. An automobile plant using only one eight-hour change a day, as Lordstown has been doing, has public lines sitting idle a other 16 hours of a day. Wasted prolongation time can be dear if a plant stays underutilized for an extended duration of time.

On paper, GM’s preference to idle a Lordstown plant and 4 other comforts creates clarity and will assistance GM’s bottom line by slicing costs. Schuster pronounced GM will still route competitors when it comes to plant efficiency, though calls shutting these plants “a step in a right direction.” CNBC reached out to General Motors for a criticism about a automaker still carrying too most ability in North America.

Last year, GM’s ability function rate in North America was among a misfortune in a attention during 73 percent. Ford’s factories were producing during 82 percent of capacity, Fiat Chrysler’s were operative 90 percent, Honda during 91 percent and Toyota during 93 percent, according to LMC Automotive.

Over a subsequent 7 years, Schuster expects GM’s ability function rate in North America to usually stand aloft and strech approximately 86 percent by 2026. That trend, along with GM’s concentration on boosting distinction per vehicle, has Wall Street assured that Barra and her group are creation a right moves.

Of course, it does small to palliate a pain for many in Lordstown. The public plant — vicious to a economy in northeast Ohio — is holding with it some-more than 1,300 jobs. Approximately 417 of those workers will send to jobs during other GM plants around a Midwest, according to a automaker. The residue will possibly retire or be laid off.

“We know how harmful that is for a workers, for their families, for internal businesses, for a whole community. We also know it doesn’t have to be this way,” Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, pronounced in pulling legislation that pays taxation credits to consumers who buy American-made vehicles and penalizes automakers that boat jobs overseas.

As for a tangible plant in Lordstown, what happens to a shuttered trickery is unclear. It’s probable another automaker or a start-up could eventually buy it from GM. The land and buildings could also be sole to another industrial organisation or a multiple of companies could repurpose a space to fit their needs. “There’s no revelation what will occur to a Lordstown plant,” pronounced Schuster. “It could eventually be bought by a Chinese automaker or a start-up we haven’t even listened most about.”