By Norihiko Shirouzo

Even as Detroit braces for big job cuts at General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co., demand for automotive engineers and students coming out of engineering schools is perking up around the Motor City, buoyed by Asian auto makers who want to develop more products for the U.S. market.

On a recent, crisp autumn day in Superior Township, Michigan, Delphi Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Robert S. "Steve" Miller stood side by side with dignitaries to cut the ribbon for a $68 million, state-of-the-art automotive engineering center.

The new R&D center belongs to Hyundai Motor Co. - one of the very Asian automakers whose competitive pressures have helped drive Detroit into its biggest crisis since the early 1990s. But Delphi's business with Hyundai has picked up, and Miller, who is demanding big pay cuts from hourly plant-floor workers at the bankrupt automotive-parts supplier, posed for cameras with a pair of oversize scissors.

"We're thrilled that Hyundai would bring a facility like this to Michigan," Miller said. Hyundai has 140 people working at the tech center, a majority of them engineers. The company said it plans to boost the number to 400 by 2007.

Asian automakers from Toyota Motor Corp. to Nissan Motor Co. to Hyundai and its subsidiary Kia Motors Corp., along with automotive suppliers from Japan and Germany, are rushing to Michigan to take advantage of the area's high concentration of automotive engineering talent.

"This area's access to ... talented engineers and designers ... and rich automotive history have combined to create a matchless environment for success," Hyundai Vice Chairman Sang Kwon Kim said in a speech at the Michigan R&D center in October. According to the state of Michigan, automotive R&D employs more than 65,000 professionals in the state.

In an effort to deal with shortages of engineers at home, Asian auto makers are opening or beefing up R&D centers around Detroit to ****** engineers away from the U.S. Big Three auto makers and their suppliers and to go aggressively after engineering students coming out of schools in the U.S. Midwest.

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, under political pressure because of big job losses at GM, Ford, Delphi and other manufacturing companies, in 2004 launched an initiative to promote Michigan as an automotive Silicon Valley. Since then, the state has won investments from nine automotive companies from South Korea and Japan and Germany that have created 3,000 engineering jobs.

"They all know Michigan is the place to come for engineering talent," Granholm said.

A growing presence of foreign automakers and suppliers' engineering facilities is "a good thing from an individual engineer's point of view" because it offers more options for American engineers at a time when opportunities at the Detroit auto makers may be on the wane, said Ray Morris, executive vice president of the Society of Automotive Engineers, a worldwide association based in Warrendale, Pa.

But for Detroit as a whole, he worries, a growing number of engineers being retired at Ford and GM or jumping ship to Asian and European automakers means that the U.S. automakers risk being mere assemblers and marketers of automobiles, without expertise in engineering.

But Asian automakers also complain of engineering shortages. Retirements in an aging society are eating into the work force in Japan, while some automakers, Toyota in particular, are growing so quickly that they can't hire engineers fast enough.

At Toyota, which is pursuing an aggressive growth strategy that could propel it past GM to become the world's No. 1 automaker, nearly 40 percent of the company's 20,000 engineers in Japan are contractors from agencies and "guest engineers" from suppliers. Toyota has to fill gaps in its midcareer engineering population that resulted from hiring freezes the company instituted in the mid- 1990s in the wake of a severe economic slowdown.

"Especially lacking, when we look ahead 10 to 20 years," said Kazuo Okamoto, a Toyota executive vice president, "are experts in material science and chemistry, as well as researchers in an area I might call 'human science.'" Those are experts in the study of the human brain and other aspects of human behavior that might someday help automakers advance in safety technology like vehicle-to- vehicle communications.

Toyota's long-term R&D strategy, Okamoto said, is to focus activities at Japan-based R&D centers more on advanced research.

As a result, engineering outposts outside Japan, like the technical center near Ann Arbor, Mich., are gaining greater responsibilities. Toyota's Michigan tech center was set up more than a decade ago initially for designing seats, instrumental panels, cup holders, bumpers and other components, as well as tuning engines and suspensions for the American marketplace. But Toyota executives said the company now is ready to let American engineers handle more critical tasks.

Source: AIADA