Mexico has become a growth pole for automobile production in North America over the last ten years, helped by a competitive currency, low labour rates and, crucially, the impact of NAFTA. GM now makes around 500,000 vehicles a year in Mexico. Stephen Dowling spoke to Bill Beaumont, until recently GM de Mexico’s chief engineer and heard about GM’s growing engineering base in Mexico.

Bill Beaumont, who has been appointed executive director of technical development at Saab headquarters in Trollhättan, Sweden, says General Motors is moving towards conducting complete exterior vehicle design in Mexico.

Asked in an interview with just-auto.com whether the day would come when original exterior vehicle design, from the model stage through to production, would be executed in Mexico, Beaumont replied: “Yes. In fact we do have a small design studio here (in Mexico).

“Obviously we are not designing anything like complete vehicles. But you will see, probably in the next 12 months, vehicles on the road that have had exterior and interior appearance designed in Mexico”.

Until February 1 Beaumont was chief engineer for GM de Mexico, a position he held for five years. When he arrived, GM had 250 fully qualified automotive engineers in the country. Today there are 820.

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They comprise “a combination of designing engineers, computer engineers and test engineers,” he said. “The reason for this growth is that there is a very capable engineering source in Mexico. Universities are turning out very good engineers and there is a need for more engineering capacity to focus on the Mexican market and support products”.

Team effort
Asked how he had changed GM’s engineering operation in Mexico, based at GM’s Toluca complex, on the western edge of Mexico City, Beaumont responded that, “It has been very much a team effort (by) a very strong team. We were looking to grow both in capability and capacity and we have done that. We have grown in most areas of the vehicle in terms of capability and this has been demonstrated as we have moved up from basic programmes to quite sophisticated vehicle programmes.

“We started in the 1990s doing localisation work for the Mexican market and took on work for products built in Mexico, like model year changes, mid-cycle enhancement, and so on. Now we are involved in major vehicle programmes.”

Beaumont added: “We have tried to expand the engineering facility and in the past five years have grown such things as the laboratory, being able to do such things as component testing, mock-ups, and so on. We have the capability to do second tier testing.”

He declined to say how much GM had invested in developing it’s engineering capacity and in re-tooling in Mexico since his arrival in 1997, saying only: “There has been significant investment.”

GM de Mexico is responsible for the engineering aspects of the Pontiac Aztek, which is assembled in Mexico, for the Rendezvous and smaller products sold in the US. Its facilities are among nine regional engineering centres that support GM’s two main engineering centres, in Michigan and Rüsselsheim, Germany.

PACE programme
At the end of 2002, 1,700 Mexican engineering students from six institutions of higher education were being trained on equipment provided by a programme called Partners for the Advancement of CAD/CAM/CAE Education (PACE), according to Beaumont, who started his career at Vauxhall’s Luton plant in the UK.

PACE is an alliance between GM and other companies such as UGS, Sun Microsystems and EDS whose aim is to develop computer-assisted automotive design and manufacturing processes in Mexico.

About 40 Mexico-trained automotive engineers are working on GM programmes in the US, according to Beaumont.

“While we have Mexican engineers who were trained by us and who have joined other manufacturers in Europe, or the Arrows Formula 1 team, for example, primarily our people are in the U.S. but we also have engineers in Brazil, Germany and China.”

In response to a question about Mexican engineers’ strong points, Beaumont said: “Technically they are very good. The universities are turning out good people. Maths skills are very high and Mexican engineers have an attitude of ‘I can do that and I can work it out.’ They are very hard working.”

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