Opel: We're Hiring!
Unheard-of news are emanating from Rüsselsheim. So unheard-of that Automobilwoche found it necessary to send out an Extra! Extra! Lesen Sie all about it e-mail to its subscribers: GM’s Opel, the very same company that wants to shed 8,000 of its 48,000 jobs in Europe, is short of people. They are hiring! One reason: Jobs are being exported from the U.S.A. to Europe.
WTF? First of, Opel is desperately seeking 250 new engineers for their Research & Development Center in Rüsselsheim. By 2014, Opel-Chef Nick Reilly wants to see 80 percent of Opel’s product portfolio renewed. Then, there is a lot of new work for alternative drivetrains. In Reilly’s budget are €11b to pay for this effort of Manhattan Project proportions. Where will the money come from? Don’t ask.
Also, end of the Abwrackprämie be damned, people are buying more Opels than planned. They are especially keen on the new Insignia and Astra. Extra shifts are being planned for Rüsselsheim and Gliwice (or Gleiwitz, as some Germans still insist to call it) in Poland.
The pressure is so high on the R&D Center that R&D bosswoman Rita Forst even considers to bring in outside technical help. The R&D Center in Rüsselsheim gives jobs to 6,500 people, amongst them 4,800 engineers. Soon, it will be more than 5,000, hard at work to develop GM’s cars of the future.
Works Council head Klaus Franz (who needs to be consulted when new people are hired) approves: “Germany receives more responsibility for development. Projects are being moved from the U.S. to Germany.” Development of the new Zafira, and of the new generation of the Corsa, will be Made in Germany.
Reilly is still hoping for €1.8b of government money, most of it from Germany. No news on that. As reported previously, the German government has indicated to abandon all hopes for a decision before the elections in North Rhine-Westphalia in early May. After those elections, there will be little reason to buy any votes.
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
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hmmmm...the Zafira and Corsa were never engineered in the US, always in Germany in the first place. So what is this guy talking about? Maybe GM was planning on Daewoo doing the engineering, but certainly not the hollowed out US engineering, which only does the following: 1) Full size truck/SUV platform 2) Corvette platform 3) manages the cobbled together international platforms (CTS). So file these under "partially engineered" in the US. Everything else is either no longer in existence (Trailblazer) or done in Germany, Korea, or Australia, or is based on a 20 year old platform (Impala) that may have originally been engineered in the US but won't be anymore (next Impala will be on stretched Epsilon, i.e. German-engineered, maybe modified by American engineers). My understanding is that the US-based engineers on the rest of the US vehicles like the Malibu "engineer" things that are only modifications to the pre-existing foreign sourced platforms. There are probably still a good amount of powertrain engineers here at GM in the US, but I would bet the ground-up powertrain engineering done here is mostly only on US-market powertrains, which again, won't be powering Opels.
Precisely, apart from pickups, Detroit contributes nothing to the table. They're only around to move money around, which is why they find themselves in this position in the first place. Opel actually does something to keep the company alive.