The Detroit Three automakers have never been in a better position since the great land rush of 1850, when the development of marine engines ignited a manufacturing boom.
As more factories were built along the Detroit River, already dominated by a century of shipbuilding, by 1915 nearly 50 auto manufacturers and 100 suppliers were competing fiercely for land.
The result was that the automakers, like everyone else, acquired whatever parcels were available — often regardless of location. Eventually, the bulging, disparate real estate holdings served to limit profits and hamper innovation, and wear down employees who had to commute from one or multiple locations on any given day.
Today, General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co., and Stellantis — some completing the journey sooner than others — have reached, by historical standards, an unprecedented achievement by consolidating their once vast real estate holdings into seven hubs.
It couldn’t have come at a better time. With China intent on dominating the global auto industry, each member of the Detroit Three needs to shorten vehicle production times by maximizing design, engineering, testing, and production.
At the same time, the industry is at the dawn of a new era where human creativity and AI work hand-in-hand to accelerate breakthroughs in vehicle hardware, software, and mobility. Stellantis, for example, has more than 150 active AI projects around the world, all working to provide customers with a smarter in-car experience, personalized and intelligent trip planning, and better quality.
Ford Motor Co. in Dearborn is the latest to fuse its operations to drive added efficiency. Through a stroke of good fortune, the company’s executives, engineers, designers, and, yes, even test drivers, are now clustered together.
Making the move last November from its iconic Glass House along Michigan Avenue to the original Henry and Edsel Ford Research and Engineering Center along Oakwood Boulevard, the new Henry Ford II World Center is the capstone of years of consolidation.
In addition to its executives being within walking distance of the tech labs, design studios, advanced robotics, and wind tunnels on the research campus, the Dearborn Development Center, located on the site of the former Ford Airport, is directly across the street.
The 260-acre proving grounds, with its miles of test tracks, allows Ford personnel to quickly travel between the headquarters, R&D center, and testing facilities. The Dearborn test track is complemented by the Michigan Proving Grounds in Romeo, which contains more than 100 miles of varying durability layouts across 3,880 acres.
GM once had dozens of operations spread across the region, but today its local footprint consists of the Warren Technical Center and Milford Proving Grounds, along with executive offices at Hudson’s Detroit. Stellantis, then known as Chrysler Corp., established its local technology center in Auburn Hills 35 years ago after leaving its original campus in Highland Park; its new vehicles are tested at the Chelsea Proving Grounds.
The larger picture of efficiency comes from the reduction of employees traveling to multiple locations on a daily basis, itself a productivity linchpin to speed the development of new vehicles within an increasingly competitive global landscape.
All told, the Detroit Three and their suppliers, along with all of Michigan, have a lot at stake in raising productivity levels as one way to better compete with China.
Consider the state’s established economic and labor resources: $348 billion in annual economic output; $37 billion invested by automakers and suppliers since 2020; a 98,000-plus engineering workforce; 8,518 patent filings in 2024 (one of four U.S. Patent Offices is in Detroit); 14 proving grounds; and four R1 universities, a classification given to doctoral institutions with “very high research activity.” In addition, 25 automotive OEM R&D and technical centers and 95 suppliers are located in Michigan.
But while the Detroit Three have a lot to brag about, the “great wall” is looming.
Recent headlines sum up the competition: “BYD Overtakes Tesla as World’s Top EV Seller” (CNBC) and “I Test Drove a Chinese EV. Now I Don’t Want to Buy American Cars Anymore,” by The Wall Street Journal’s technology columnist. In turn, Reuters reported last September that China had replaced Germany and moved for the first time into the top 10 of the United Nations’ annual ranking of most innovative countries, as firms in Beijing invest heavily in research and development.
“Michigan cannot expect to win the future of the (mobility) industry through legacy alone,” says Glenn Stevens Jr., executive director of MichAuto and chief automotive and innovation officer at the Detroit Regional Chamber.
“Our hometown teams are competing on a scale and against a competitive force that they’ve never done before. Chinese companies like Xiaomi and BYD are bent on dominating the global market. But it’s not just the scale; it’s the speed of innovation, the tools they’re using, the assembly processes, design and engineering, vehicle structure, and electronics. It is happening, and we have to embrace it.”
In addition, China has an abundance of cheap labor and the world’s largest reserve of precious metals to help speed product development.
The Detroit Three state they are positioned to meet China’s wave of new, lighter, and greener vehicles, and are working to reduce costs across the board.
“At Ford, we’re … focused on applied research, understanding the problems of our customers, including the manufacturing organization, the development staff, dealerships, and the actual end customer, then applying our research to how we can solve the biggest problems,” says Matt Jones, head of global technical strategies and research and advanced engineering at Ford.
Apart from southeast Michigan, Ford’s research and advanced engineering activities, like those of its competitors, span the globe. Ford satellite hubs are located in Canada, the U.K., Germany, and Australia. It also has product development centers in Thailand, India, China, Turkey, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Dubai.
To advance innovation, Ford periodically hosts “pitch days” in the U.S., U.K., and Germany, where business incubators, early stage companies, and startups — both from inside and outside the company — gather to share their latest ideas.
“It’s not like ‘Shark Tank,’ where you’re in or out,” Jones says. “We bring the right people from across our massive product development and R&D organizations to meet these companies so that we can jointly ideate where this could help in the future.”
The idea for Canopy, Ford’s AI-driven truck bed camera security system, began in the company’s internal incubator and was spun out as a joint venture between Ford and ADT. Ford fully acquired Canopy in 2024.
While not exclusively a Ford R&D hub, Michigan Central, the 30-acre district anchored by Michigan Central Station in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood, is home to Ford’s Model e (electric vehicle) and autonomous vehicle business units, and more recently became the headquarters of Lincoln. But beyond Ford Motor itself, Michigan Central has become what participants call the center of gravity for emerging industries.
In 2025 alone, the Michigan Central Innovation District, which includes Newlab, attracted some 240 companies that collectively have accessed more than $1 billion from 30-plus venture capital firms. There are also partnerships with the University of Michigan Center for Innovation, Wayne State University, and Grand Valley State University.
At GM, the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company, or DELCO, was founded in 1909 in Dayton, Ohio, by Charles F. Kettering and Edward A. Deeds. The firm’s signature achievement was the invention of the electric self-starter, first offered in the 1912 Cadillac. General Motors acquired DELCO in 1916, and it became the precursor to GM’s R&D enterprise.
But like its crosstown rivals, The General operated from multiple locations. Al Trombetta, a retired supervisor of the Midsize Car Division of GM’s North American Operations, who began his 33-year career in 1980, says that when he started, the automaker’s engineering groups were split by divisions.
“They all had their own centers and were spread across the state,” Trombetta says. “Oldsmobile engineering was in Lansing, Pontiac Cars was in Pontiac, (and) trucks were spread out in suburban design shops, along with a huge building in Pontiac (now M1 Concourse and, in a separate area, the headquarters of United Wholesale Mortgage).
“Cadillac and Buick were in Flint. Saturn was in Madison Heights and Troy. All of these engineering sites eventually were closed down and moved to the Tech Center. I worked at most of these centers, and I spent a lot of time on the road going from one place to another.”
Over time, the automaker steadily expanded its Warren Technical Center. Still, the traditional methods of product development continued until 1998, when Larry Burns was appointed vice president of research, development, and planning. That’s when the old model was flipped.
Burns reported: “(Former GM CEO) Rick (Wagoner) sat down with me for lunch and said, ‘Larry, I don’t have time to think 10 years out, nor do the other members of the Automotive Strategy Board. And I’m curious, if you were going to invent the automobile today rather than 100 years ago, what would you do different? That’s what I want you to be thinking about.’ ”
To help answer that question, Burns’ team tore down a Toyota Prius and a Chevy Malibu to show Wagoner what they were envisioning.
“(Wagoner) looked at that and he got it,” Burns recalled. “He said, ‘This is going to be a software car and it’s going to really change the industry.’ ”
Soon after, Burns restructured R&D around science labs and technology implementation.
“How do we get these ideas validated within the product development process?” he wondered.
Burns credits Wagoner for saving GM’s research initiatives. “The top finance and engineering people have so much short-term pressure, their budgets are never sufficient,” he says.
“Whenever our Strategy Board looked at quarterly earnings and saw we were missing our target, sure enough, someone would raise their hand and say, ‘Well, it looks like we’ve got to cut our R&D budget.’ And Rick would say, ‘No, we’re not going to do that. We can go bankrupt because we run out of money or we can go bankrupt because we’re obsolete on technology.’ ”
GM’s R&D activities today comprise 75 labs and 223,000 square feet of laboratory and testing space. The work is concentrated at the Kettering Research and Development Center at the Warren Tech Center, while related expertise can be found at the GM Proving Grounds in Milford (testing), Mountain View, Calif. (AI), Shanghai (materials), and Herzliya, Israel (software and robotics).
In turn, Hughes Research Laboratories, a vestige of former GM Chairman Roger Smith’s so-called “Lulu” acquisition of Hughes Aircraft Co. in 1985, is co-owned by GM and Boeing and contributes exploratory and basic research.
As a measure of the automaker’s recent push for efficiency on the fly, Linda Cadwell Stancin joined General Motors as executive vice president and head of research and development in January 2025, after serving as vice president of air vehicle engineering at Lockheed Martin and Boeing/Spirit AeroSystems.
“When I joined GM, it was really clear to me that our researchers and engineers, particularly around Detroit, are incredibly talented,” Stancin says. “We defined our new mission together, which is to identify, invent, and develop research that delivers disruptive technology, and products people crave and experiences that they never forget, with distinctive value for the company.
“We shifted our R&D investments upstream to ensure that new research developed the features and capabilities that are ready to be incorporated in our product development cycle,” she adds.
Chrysler also built its R&D prowess step by step.
In December 1930, a special issue of Automobile Topics devoted one-third of its 102 pages to Chrysler Engineering. The issue included biographical sketches of Frederick Zeder, Owen Skelton, and Carl Breer — founder Walter P. Chrysler’s engineering wunderkinds known as “The Three Musketeers.”
The magazine declared, “Engineering research has always occupied a prominent place in Chrysler planning (since it was founded in 1925). Indicative of this is the unusual size and scope of the Chrysler Engineering laboratories (then at its original Highland Park headquarters) headed by an engineering triumvirate that knows no peer — Zeder, Skelton, and Breer.”
The original Chrysler Six of 1924 alone had seven “firsts” on American cars: a high-compression engine, four-wheel hydraulic brakes, an oil filter, an air cleaner, an independent hand brake, a temperature gauge, and an electric fuel gauge on the dashboard. Chrysler engineering flourished because Walter P. Chrysler was willing to support it with buildings, equipment, staff, and funding.
The Chrysler Engineering Building, completed in 1928, was constructed on the site of half a dozen different automotive manufacturers that eventually became Maxwell Motor Co. The four-story building cost $1 million and had 960,000 square feet of laboratory space, a cold room with below-zero temperatures, and a chassis roll machine that subjected a car’s chassis, frame, and body to stress.
In documents at the Walter P. Chrysler Museum, Breer recounted that the founder never questioned corporate spending on facilities or equipment, even where a return wasn’t obvious.
In late 1929, following the stock market crash, when Chrysler reportedly called a meeting of all department heads and ordered them to reduce expenses by 20 percent, he took Breer aside and told him to ignore the order. Chrysler claimed he never made any cuts in research, for fear of mortgaging the future.
By the mid-1980s, Chrysler had operations in 28 different locations and began considering grouping its platform, research, engineering, manufacturing, and design teams and corporate staffs into one location.
The $1 billion Chrysler Technical Center (CTC) in Auburn Hills, at 5.4 million square feet and the second largest office building in the U.S. after the Pentagon, opened in 1991.
In an interview with The Christian Science Monitor at the time, Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca queried whether the automaker “could have gotten away without it.”
Before CTC opened, he said, “an engineer at Chrysler had to go to 20 different places to get his job done” because the company’s design and engineering operations were scattered all over metropolitan Detroit.
“That’s a tough way to compete with the rest of the world,” he noted.
The CTC now houses approximately 15,000 employees, contractors, and suppliers; research and development facilities; a 170,000-square-foot pilot plant; and a wind tunnel.
Today, after its recent history of mergers, owners, and name changes, the company that Chrysler started in Highland Park benefits from the technical resources of multinational automotive group Stellantis.
The group’s R&D centers in North America, Europe, South America, and Asia support vehicle engineering, propulsion systems, software, component testing, and full vehicle development.
Its technology footprint includes several R&D and testing centers in North America: the Automotive Research & Development Centre in Windsor, Ontario; the Chelsea Proving Grounds; and the Mexico Technical Engineering Center in Mexico City. Stellantis reported total R&D spending of $6.1 billion in 2024.
Meanwhile, back in China, Xinhua, the country’s official state news agency, reported in September that R&D expenditure rose 8.9 percent year-to-year, to more than 3.6 trillion yuan (about $506.4 billion) in 2025, making China the world’s second-largest R&D investor.
Moving ahead, three avenues are emerging that the U.S. can pursue to keep the U.S.-China R&D gap from narrowing: education, public policy, and collaboration.
Embracing those principles, Ford and GM are part of the Michigan Economic Development Corp.’s Talent Action Team that works with higher education students to provide input and feedback related to curriculum development, job training, and career exploration.
“There are three legs to the R&D stool here in the U.S. — the university leg; a government laboratory leg (the DOE, DOD, NASA, and NIH); and then there’s the industrial leg,” says Alton Romig Jr., executive director and COO at the National Academy of Engineering in Washington, D.C.
“The Chinese have a strategy that integrates all three of those. I don’t think we have the right kind of interconnectivity between the government, universities, the labs, and industry. But if we want the U.S. to compete in automotive, that’s going to require a national investment.”
The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget request includes $25 million for the Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technology Office, a 90 percent decrease from 2025 annual appropripriations. The request prioritizes activities that “meet Administration goals of energy dominance, growth of U.S. industry and manufacturing, support for national defense, and cost savings to households and business.”
The automobility industry’s collaboration with government and universities is ongoing. Ford is partnering with the University of Michigan and the REMADE Institute on initiatives focused on sustainability and the circular economy.
Its “Clean Sheet” research project from 2024 focuses on developing new design tools and manufacturing processes to increase the use of post-consumer recycled aluminum and steel while analyzing the carbon intensity of sheet metal supply chains. Ford also is developing high-recyclable alloys for EV structural castings with greater than 40 percent post-industrial scrap.
GM also collaborated with the University of Michigan to use anonymous vehicle GPS data to adjust the timing of traffic lights in Oakland County.
Alan Taub, professor of mechanical engineering and material science and engineering at U-M, believes continued research of electric vehicles offers opportunities for the Detroit Three.
“We’re in the middle of the transition from EVs being government incentivized to being the vehicle of choice,” Taub predicts. “As long as the (local automakers) keep up in their engineering improvements and cycles of learning, in a level playing field I’d put them against anybody in the world.”
