GM Heritage Center Information Kits
The GM Heritage Center now has the GM "information" kits available online in .PDF document format. Note that .PDF files require Adobe Acrobat Reader.
| Year | GM Heritage Center Link |
| 1955 | 1955-Chevrolet.pdf |
| 1955 | Chevrolet-Trucks/1955-Chevrolet-Truck-1st-Series.pdf |
| 1955 | Chevrolet-Trucks/1955-Chevrolet-Truck-2nd-Series.pdf |
| 1956 | 1956 Chevrolet.pdf |
| 1956 | Chevrolet-Trucks/1956-Chevrolet-Truck.pdf |
| 1957 | 1957-Chevrolet.pdf |
| 1957 | Chevrolet1957-Chevrolet-Truck.pdf |
These can be downloaded to your PC/MAC from this page.
Other Chevrolet models are also available online such as other years of full size Chevrolets, Luminas, Cavaliers, Citations, Vegas, trucks, and later versions of Camaro, Nova, Monte Carlo, etc. than shown in these links. For additional years of Chevrolets visit http://www.gmheritagecenter.com/gm-heritage-archive/vehicle-information-kits.html and filter by year range and "Chevrolet".
If your car was originally sold or built in Canada, you will have to contact Vintage Vehicle Services. There is a fee for this service but they'll send you, what I refer to as a 'confirmation sheet' showing when/where the car was built along with all the options it came with. Latest information I have of the cost is $119.00 CDN as of October 2013; for U.S dollars, whatever the current exchange rate is. See here for more details.
Chevrolet produced more vehicles than all the other GM divisions combined and thereby generated a much higher volume of records which were a storage problem.
After the end of a year's production, the build records have very little business value to Chevrolet and therefore were not considered to be high priority for retention. GM record retention policy required the assembly plants to retain said documents for only about six months. Some records (including build sheets) were retained longer at the Corvette assembly plants, St. Louis and Flint. However, when Corvette production ceased at these locations, the records were pitched. It should be noted that the current Corvette Assembly Plant in Bowling Green, KY, retained the 1981-present vehicle manifests that are available now through the National Corvette Museum. This was against all odds, as there were many movements over the years within GM to destroy them because they had no business value to GM.
Meanwhile, back at the Tech Center in Warren, Michigan, the Chevrolet Engineering Records Retention Policy called for periodic destruction of non-essential records, of which the build documents were one, and this was carried out on a routine basis. The other GM divisions, Cadillac, Pontiac, etc., had much smaller production volumes and interpreted the GM Records Retention Policy differently and therefore retained said documents.
If GM changes the links to any of the files above, please let me know so I can track them down. As a last resort I have copies of ALL of these plus full size Chevrolets from 1955 through 1972 and Corvettes from 1953 through 2006.
According to Jim Mattison who was a long time GM employee and founder of the Pontiac Historical Society GM had records stored in a facility dating back to the 20's and 30's. A secretary at the facility decided GM didn't need to keep all those 'old records' and had them all destroyed.
