Welcome to the Daily 5 report for Monday, Sept. 15.
Generational change is coming to the intellectual and innovation nerve centers of Ford Motor Co. and General Motors. Both companies are in the process of moving their headquarters to cutting-edge structures nearby.
But make no mistake, these aren't moves by company brass to build more luxurious places to run their companies. These are symbolic messages to talented future corporate leaders that Ford and GM aren't tired old legacy automakers. These are companies with a solid future in their second century of competing on the world automotive stage.
For the last several years, the Detroit 3 have faced formidable startup competition from Tesla Inc., tech companies and Chinese automakers such as BYD. But they also avoided existential mistakes of going too far or too fast into the trendy electric vehicle and autonomous technology segments.
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As a result, Ford and GM can enjoy the luxury of developing showplace headquarters that can compete for talent against the Teslas and BYDs of the world.
Perhaps the most compelling and unexpected part of Ford's headquarters plan — which actually began about 10 years ago under former CEO Mark Fields — will be razing the famed Henry Ford II World Center "Glass House" in Dearborn, Mich., by mid-2028.
This signals that the Ford family doesn't need to cling to an aging, costly structure for sentimental purposes and, instead, wants a headquarters that feels like the future.
At GM, CEO Mary Barra offers a similar message as the automaker moves into a gleaming new office building in the heart of downtown Detroit while it vacates the terribly designed 1970s-era silos of the Renaissance Center. When you want to recruit executive talent, it's tough to sell innovators on working in literally a 50-year-old silo.
We absorbed a terrific firsthand look at GM's new headquarters building last week at our Automotive News Congress. It was impressive.
Speaking of Chinese competitors, two of them just partnered with a respected contract manufacturer in Europe — Austria's Magna Steyr, a unit of Canada's Magna International Inc. Guangzhou Automobile Group and Xpeng are launching production of EVs with Magna in Graz, Austria, to help avoid tariffs placed by the European Union on Chinese-built EVs.
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— Philip Nussel, online editor
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