GM Wooing Top Tech Talent, Ammann Says

DETROIT – General Motors President Dan Ammann says the automaker continues to build out its autonomous-vehicle engineering team and, while the available talent pool for the project remains small, those top-tier scientists and technical professionals are increasingly willing to join the company.

“It’s been a real interesting story over the last couple of years,” Ammann tells WardsAuto on the sidelines of the 2018 North American International Auto Show here. “If you look at where we were and where we are now, the level of interest in the company to potential employees has never been greater.”

Detroit automakers yoked by a Rust Belt industrial stereotype historically have struggled to land new graduates, such as the rare data scientists who find Silicon Valley startups and tech heavyweights more appealing.

It’s a bit ironic, too, because some of the nation’s top technical colleges are just a stone’s throw from the Southeast Michigan headquarters of GM, Ford and FCA US. But many of those graduates, experts say, came of age during the industry’s downturn 10 years ago and have a sour viewpoint. Elsewhere in the country, the industry’s reputation has been even bleaker.

But technology wizard Elon Musk elevated the industry’s profile with the launch of luxury electric-vehicle maker Tesla, which also shined a light on autonomous cars and the career-making advanced engineering work to be done on them.

Then two years ago, in a bid to accelerate its own AV work, Ammann brokered a blockbuster deal to acquire Cruise Automation and its 40 employees working on some of the most advanced forms of the technology. In those 24 months, GM has deployed the industry’s biggest fleet of test AVs, applied mass-manufacturing to their assembly and earlier this month revealed plans to launch a fleet of driverless cars for ride-hailing in 2019.

GM’s Cruise Automation unit grew ten-fold in two years, Ammann reports.

In a report issued Tuesday, industrial research group Navigant ranks GM and Waymo in a dead heat for AV leadership. Tesla fell to last and behind other surging old-line manufacturers such as Daimler-Bosch, Volkswagen and Ford.

GM also recently started its own car-sharing unit Maven, invested $500 million in ride-hailing company Lyft and in October acquired California-based startup Strobe, an expert in the Lidar technology necessary for AVs.

“The momentum that we have, where people see us in a leadership position in future mobility and on the cutting edge of new technologies, whether it is driverless cars or (new) trucks or the Corvette ZR1, we are really pushing the envelope in every dimension of the business,” says Ammann, who joined GM in 2010 from banker Morgan Stanley.

Ammann cites as evidence ten-fold employment growth within Cruise Automation since it was acquired. The pitch is relatively straightforward, he says.

“If you want to come to the place where this technology is actually going to get commercialized on a large scale, come here,” Ammann says.

Joining a company with thousands of people working on AV technology would seem to run counter to the prevailing notion that the smartest young technical talent prefers smaller organizations where they can perhaps move more quickly and make a bigger splash. But that’s not entirely true, Ammann adds.

“If you look at Cruise Automation, they were on a path to doing it themselves,” he says. “As they got into it and began to understand the magnitude of what has to go right for it to happen, they saw a huge benefit to being part of a company with our capabilities and resources.”

GM is spending about $1 billion annually to fund its AV program and Ammann expects that level of investment to continue as the automaker continues to hire into its software group at a rapid rate, ramps up AV testing and builds more of the cars for deployment.

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