Chevy’s Finch speaks fluent truck, helped create Duramax engine

Praises farmers as ‘the people who are feeding the world’

By Farms.com Media Team

If you stop by the Chevrolet Commercial Vehicles exhibit at the National Farm Equipment Show, you might be very lucky and run into a 71-year-old team member from Milford, Michigan who you might describe as razor sharp, a true gentleman, but who knows he could still win an arm-wrestle with anyone else in the building.

Mike Finch has been retired for 17 years now, but Chevy still wants him at the trade shows. He says it’s because he speaks “fluent in trucks.” But there’s more to the story. Or the other Chevy staff would not refer to him at times as “the legend.”

Finch was there at the very beginning of the Chevy Duramax diesel engine. As in, there was literally a blank sheet of paper. Which eventually became the Duramax, described by Truck Trend as “the first high-pressure common-rail, direct-injection powerplant to hit the U.S. vehicle market.

“The original Duramax was a vast improvement over GM’s previous indirect-injection diesel, and it beat both Dodge and Ford to the punch when it debuted for the ’01 year.”

Finch of course has some interesting stories about the development of the Duramax, including the collaboration between GM and Isuzu (DMAX) and the insistence that the production be located in Moraine, Ohio.

Finch, who was also involved in the development of Chevy’s 4500 and 5500 medium-duty truck lines, today lives very close to the General Motors Milford Proving Ground, which was the industry’s first dedicated automobile testing facility when it opened in 1924.

And he always enjoys his time at the farm show in Louisville.

“I love the farm families. I really enjoy meeting them. These are the people who are feeding the world.”