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Cool lunch
One of the nice things about living in Detroit is being near the auto industry. I am not a “car guy” but I do like to find out what the people here are into… And cars are #1 with the men of Romeo.

Today I had a chance to have lunch with one of my tremendous LF volunteers and also take a look at some of what he does. I can just summarize by saying, I had no idea.

After lunch
After we enjoyed some classic greasy spoon food on Van Dyke, we headed over to the Warren Campus of the GM Tech Center. This is a true campus… Massive. A mile square at least.

I checked in and got my handy ID badge. From there we had free reign to check out what amounted to a GM Chop Shop. All throughout the building were areas that took apart car or tested their cars. I guess I expected to see a lot of this. They also mock up new cars in the same building, but there wasn’t any of that going on now. I did get to see the new Hummer H3 and a few other new things for 2006 and beyond. Perhaps most impressive to me were the cars they are working on using hydrogen cells. At auto shows you get stuck way behind these things, but at the Tech Center I got to kick the tires a bit.

The only other thing that struck me as odd, but as I thought about it made perfect sense. GM buys their competitors cars, tests the tar out of them, and then takes them apart (completely) and studies each part. Such as, my friend designs the seats for GM vehicles. So he looks at every seat in all the cars on the market, worldwide.

Overall
This was a fun trip for me. In a lot of ways, I have no idea what I was looking at. I am sure in some ways I saw things that were private or at least not released to the public yet… But I was just in awe of the whole thing. From now on when I drive by the Tech Center… I will have a new respect for what they do.

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