General Motors officially announced on Tuesday, July 13, it’s bringing its Advanced Design Center to Pasadena, where it will invest $71 million to build a new campus that focuses on mobility that falls outside the production scope of traditional vehicles.
The auto-making giant says it wants to bring the company closer to technology hubs, leading universities and design schools while creating jobs and increasing its own capacity.
The nearly 150,000-square-foot campus will sit on 8 acres, where GM’s technology teams will research and develop key mobility technologies with a goal of increasing safety, reducing emissions and congestion, company officials said in their announcement.
“Having a physical presence in Southern California’s technology epicenter is an integral part of our global design operations and this new innovation campus will not only expand our operations twofold, but offers access to the rich cultural diversity and talent in the region,” Michael Simcoe, GM vice president of Global Design, said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Our positioning will allow us to attract dynamic candidates in fields that will bolster GM’s proven design capabilities and challenge conventional thinking of what our future portfolio of connected products and services can encompass.”
The move is actually an expansion from North Hollywood, where the company’s design facilities had been operating for several years. The company will retain its space at the North Hollywood Design Center until the new campus is completed in the second half of 2022, officials said.
In effect, Detroit-based GM — home to Chevrolet, Buick, GMC & Cadillac and said to be the nation’s largest automaker– sees the move as a chance to grow.
The company’s more recent innovations include a lunar rover concept, developed in partnership with Lockheed Martin, and Cadillac’s personal autonomous concept vehicle, along with vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, according to the company.
Company officials see the new space as vital as a lab to design and develop new tools to create new designs whil also being a hub for internal and external GM partnerships, they said.
Southern California, of course, is not new to GM. Along with the North Hollywood facility, GM also had a design facility in Newbury Park, from the 1980s into the the 90s, and Panorama City in the San Fernando Valley was home to a GM auto-making plant in the post-World War II era all the way up to the early 1990s.
The current site — which will consist of three buildings — will be at Sierra Madre Villa and Rosemead Boulevard, in an area of the city recently making some noise on the tech real estate front. The company bought the East Pasadena site for $49.5 million, with plans to spend more capital on modifying the buildings there. Escrow closed on the property on July 7, according to an internal city summmary of the transaction.
The news follows the recent sale of the property at 495 N. Halstead St., where Lincoln Property Company has signed a lease with biotech company Xencor, a former Pasadena business and Caltech startup, which will be moving its headquarters and laboratory from Monrovia into Pasadena.
Last week, agents announced Motiv Space Systems is expanding into the former site of the popular Robin’s Wood Fire BBQ at 395 N. Rosemead Blvd. in a deal worth $4 million.
The area’s city councilman, Gene Masuda, said the GM move will be huge in a city with a reputation for industrial design and development.
“I think it’s great for the city of Pasadena,” he said. “I like the collaborative nature of the facility. I’m looking at it as creating more jobs for the area. We have places, so many tech businesses, that can can benefit from having GM here. At The ArtCenter College of Design, we have a lot of students who are in creative work. I can just imagine that this will be a good place for them to work and be part of developing future cars.”