American Axle to be sole supplier of truck axles at GM plant in Canada

American Axle & Manufacturing will be the sole supplier of front and rear pickup axles for trucks built at General Motors’ Oshawa, Ont., plant when production begins there later this year.

The new business for American Axle is in addition to its current supply of axles to GM’s full-size pickup assembly facilities in Indiana, Michigan and Mexico.

GM plans to begin full-size truck production in Oshawa sometime in the fourth quarter of this year. The automaker hasn’t said which models — the GMC Sierra or Chevrolet Silverado — Oshawa will build, only that “the plant will be flexible.” 

American Axle said in a statement that the new work “continues to leverage AAM’s strategic partnership with GM.” The supplier originally spun off from GM in 1994.

“This is a critical part of our business and integral to our two-pronged approach to support both internal combustion and battery electric/hybrid vehicles with the industry’s leading driveline technology,” American Axle CEO David Dauch said in a statement. 

Neither the supplier nor automaker stated the value of the contract. GM accounted for 39 percent of American Axle's sales in 2020, the supplier said in its most recent annual report.

The automaker originally planned to start production in January 2022, but GM Canada President Scott Bell said on the May 7 episode of the Automotive News Canada Conversations podcast that it’s the company’s intent to start out “as early as we can in that fourth quarter,” but didn’t want to commit to a definitive date.

He said demand for the automaker’s full-size trucks drove the accelerated retooling of the plant. GM in September 2020 committed $1.3 billion to the plant so it could once again build trucks, something that stopped in December 2019.

GM is looking to hire nearly 1,700 people — 1,500 of them production workers represented by the union Unifor.