Move over, Silicon Valley, there’s a new player in town. And it’s not down the street in California but across the border, with the recent opening of the General Motors Canadian Technical Centre in Markham, Ontario, on January 19, 2018.
Located just north of Toronto, the new facility is the fourth GM campus in Ontario, along with Oshawa, Kitchener–Waterloo, and a cold-weather test centre in Kapuskasing. Plans for a fifth campus in downtown Toronto, specializing in urban mobility, are also under way.
GM says the Markham centre is the largest new automotive innovation hub in Canada. It covers 150,000 square feet over three floors, and will concentrate primarily on hardware and software for electric, connected, autonomous, and shared vehicles. This includes infotainment systems, active safety systems, and software and controls for self-driving cars. About half of its planned 700 engineers are already employed, with 80 of them added on two days in January, and applications pour in each month. There will also be 300 positions added at the Oshawa campus.
The building originally started life as an American Express call centre. The plans for its new role were finalized in May 2017, and it was “taken down to the studs and rebuilt,” says Brian Tossan, the Technical Centre’s director, who took autoTRADER.ca on a tour of it.
It would almost seem to make more sense to put this new centre in the city of Oshawa, some 55 kilometres away, where General Motors of Canada was founded and still has its head office, along with an OnStar call centre. But Markham has grown from a rural community to a high-tech capital with a culturally diverse workforce. IBM is here, as is OnX, Huawei Technologies, Lenovo, GE Digital Energy, Toshiba, and many others, and the GM Technical Centre draws talent from all sectors, not just strictly automotive.
“The reality is that these people could get a job anywhere here, at any of these companies nearby, and a sixty-minute commute won’t fly with them,” says George Saratlic, lead manager of GM’s brand communications. “They want to be close to the city and in the middle of everything, and so this had to be here as well.”
The floors are open-concept, with modular work stations, and any closed-door offices have glass walls. Parking spaces by the door have electric vehicle charging stations. The building is flooded with natural light, and a huge first-floor atrium is used as a work space when it’s not hosting events, such as this official ribbon-cutting. White boards are mounted on racks, and can be detached and their information taken to other meetings as needed.
And taking a page from the Silicon Valley playbook, there seems to be a cafeteria around every corner: Tossan says employees are encouraged to congregate and brainstorm over snacks and coffee. In one corner, there’s foosball and a pool table.
And they don’t just collaborate with each other. The Markham centre is connected to GM’s other global technical centres through video and teleconferencing. Several of the employees rotate between centres. One of these, the innovation lab at the Communitech campus in Kitchener–Waterloo, is known as “2908”, named for a millennium after GM’s founding in 1908. With access to talent from the University of Waterloo, the lab focuses on understanding how customers will handle upcoming technologies, using digital and physical prototypes that replicate everything from infotainment systems to GM’s OnStar. Employees train at new sites, and then take that information back to their home offices.
In another lab in the Markham centre, a computer program simulates an assembly line. The company uses it to train factory workers on their jobs before they physically bolt vehicles together at the Oshawa assembly plant. The software, supplied by a vendor and used at 26 plants in North America, also helps engineers to design components and the required installation tasks to install them.
Along with officially opening the centre, the automaker announced the GM Canada STEM Fund, with $1.8 million earmarked for educational programs that will encourage students, especially girls starting as early as grades four through eight, in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). The fund also includes scholarships, initially with one at the University of Waterloo, for engineering students. The automotive world is no longer just about engines and tires, and across the industry, a new wave of engineers and technicians is shaping the cars we’ll be driving – or that possibly one day will be driving us.
