A Venza at the new Toyota engineering center near Detroit, which also includes a new test track.
It may be the home of the Big Three but Detroit has also become a major engineering center for foreign makers as diverse as Mercedes-Benz and India’s Tata Motors. And now, three of the largest Asian makers are stepping up hiring as they expand their Motor City R&D centers.
Collectively, Toyota, Nissan and Hyundai expect to add nearly 400 employees in the Detroit suburbs this year, with additional engineering-related jobs to be offered in 2013 and beyond.
With Nissan moving more engineering work to the US, the Japanese automaker is plans to hire as many as 150 additional engineers this year at its technical center in Farmington Hills to handle a steadily increasing work load.
“We haven’t hired any new engineers in three or four years,” said Carla Bailo, president Nissan Technical Center North America. In addition, the center lost employees following the 2008 financial crisis. “We have a lot of very good senior engineers. But we need to bring on new and emerging talent,” Bailo said.
The tech center currently has a full-time staff of 800, she said in an interview. But Nissan is increasing the tempo of its product development effort and increasing the amount of work done at its Farmington Hills, which is responsible for product engineering of vehicle bodies throughout North and Latin America. One of the Farmington Hills projects, the 2013 Nissan Pathfinder, was unveiled officially at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.
One area in which the Farmington Hills technical center is taking on additional responsibility is in the area of fuel cells and electric vehicles. The Farmington Hills technical center has had a small laboratory staffed by PHDs working on fuel cells for some time. However, it is being expanded to encompass research on electric vehicle batteries and recharging of electric vehicles.
“We used to hire mechanical engineers and some electrical engineers but now we’re hiring chemical engineers as well,” said Bailo, who is based in Farmington Hills but is also responsible for Nissan Technical centers in Mexico and Brazil.
(Daimler, BMW announce major expansions, new jobs, at plants in the Carolinas. Click Here for more.)
Hyundai, meanwhile, will invest $15 million to expand the Hyundai American Technical Center in Superior Township, near the university town of Ann Arbor, setting up, among other things, a 50,000 square-foot facility that can be used for extreme hot and cold weather testing. With construction set to begin by May, as many as 50 engineers and other workers will be hired when work is completed next year.
“This is the first time to build this kind of facility outside of Korea,” said Sung Hwan, president of the Korean maker’s R&D center.
As for Toyota, “We’re adding at least 100 new jobs” at the Toyota engineering center in Washtenaw County, notes Jim Lentz, the Japanese maker’s top American executive, “and there’ll be more in the future. Detroit is the hub of our engineering operations in North America.”
A significant plus, added Lentz, is the proximity of so many schools, like the University of Michigan, with major engineering departments.
The biggest challenge could prove to be what the Engineering Society of Detroit describes as an increasing shortage of trained engineers. During the depths of the recession there were sharp cuts at the Detroit Big Three and even Nissan and other outside makers had to cut staff in Detroit-area R&D operations. But those have largely either left the city, retired – or found new jobs.
Nissan’s Bailo says she expects to get some experienced personnel but expects to have to attract most of the new engineers straight off university campuses.
Paul A. Eisenstein contributed to this report.