GM, Federal Labs Team Up on Technology : Manufacturing: The nation’s largest auto maker meets with weapons experts to see how military research and materials can be used on domestic front.
Several hundred scientists and engineers from General Motors and most of the leading national research laboratories are holding unprecedented meetings here this week to explore ways of transferring long-secret technology to the troubled U.S. auto industry.
Scientists from such weapons labs as Lawrence Livermore in California and Los Alamos in New Mexico have gathered at GM’s technical center to display their wares in areas ranging from flexible manufacturing and new-materials research to safety and energy efficiency.
Coming after a year of back-and-forth visits by top GM engineers and laboratory scientists, the joint talks are the broadest example yet of government-industry technological collaboration of the sort that has been instrumental in Japan’s competitive success against U.S. industries.
“As far as I know, this is the most massive undertaking yet by an individual corporation in the area of technology transfer,” said Gordon Longerbeam, former head of the technology transfer program at the University of California-operated lab in Livermore, Calif.
The potential cooperation between GM and the dozen laboratories represented here centers on such disciplines as precision manufacturing techniques; new strong, lightweight composite materials; ways of inspecting the insides of components for defects, and sensors for everything from crash avoidance to controlling engine emissions.
“GM is the largest manufacturing company in the U.S., probably in the world, and the things they do at GM cover every type of technology,” said John Umbarger, head of the advanced manufacturing program at Los Alamos. “So when you enhance GM, you’re going to enhance the whole technological base.”
The needs of the nation’s troubled industrial sector also dovetail with the search for new roles for the national laboratory system. The system involves more than 700 federally funded laboratories and has traditionally focused its efforts toward defense research. That has changed with the end of the Cold War.
“This is potentially a new model for government-industry cooperation,” said Reid Detchon, a deputy assistant energy secretary for conservation and renewable energy.
Detchon said closer ties with the U.S. auto industry, which is losing ground in a brutal competitive struggle with Japanese auto firms, will sharply accelerate the “industry-driven” national research favored by the Bush Administration.
Detchon said any gains to GM from working with the federal laboratories will spill over to other U.S. auto producers and industries.
“We are not picking winners and losers,” he said, referring to common criticism of proposals for a government-directed industrial policy.
Many credit Congress with playing the greater role in the 1980s in redirecting the national research community toward economic, environmental and other non-defense needs. The end of the Cold War was the “milestone event” in that regard, but the 1989 National Competitiveness Technology Transfer Act fostered the labs’ cooperative ventures with industry, said Longerbeam.
GM, Ford Motor Co., Chrysler Corp., steel and plastics makers and dozens of biotechnology, software and computer firms are among those already doing piecemeal work with various federally funded laboratories.
But the Big Three auto makers, with annual research and development budgets of about $4 billion, can profoundly affect the research agenda by joining forces with the national laboratory system. By comparison, the 90 contracts signed or pending between Livermore and other firms total a mere $30 million.
Already, one of the biggest contracts at the Los Alamos, N.M., laboratory was signed with GM earlier this year: a $3.3-million deal to develop a prototype fuel-cell system to power cars, vans and buses.
The Big Three’s U.S. Battery Consortium, meanwhile, was recently joined by the Energy Department on a 50-50 funding basis. It is an all-out research effort to develop a battery for electric cars and has solicited help from the national labs.
These initiatives show GM’s growing interest in looking beyond its own sizable engineering staff for technological know-how. The company’s top research engineer, Donald Runkle, has been urging a collaborative “moon shot” to find breakthrough technologies to regain the nation’s industrial competitiveness.
But GM says it hopes to “be the first auto manufacturer to leverage the resources of the National Laboratory System.”
Also represented at this week’s meetings are Sandia National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Pacific Northwest Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Wright Patterson National Laboratory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Federal Laboratory Consortium.
