(WXYZ) — The General Motors Technical Center in Warren is the heart of innovation for the automaker and a national historic landmark.
GM President Mark Reuss gave me an exclusive one-on-one tour as the company celebrates the tech center's 70th anniversary in 2026, as well as the completion of a 10-year restoration of the campus and a new corporate giving pledge for Southeast Michigan.
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The iconic water tower may be the first landmark most people see, but the first stop on my tour had the cars front and center – both current and classic.
"I love the fact that you're showcasing some of your legacy vehicles here," I said.
"Right? Fun, fun stuff. Yeah, for sure," Reuss said.
"Do you have a favorite?" I asked.
"Someone said, 'What's your favorite car?' I said, 'Well, you haven't seen it yet.' So, I live in the future a lot. So, that's what this place is all about, right, creating the future here," he said.
The Tech Center is home to 25,000 employees across the 710-acre campus. It was originally built in 1956 to combine GM's research and development. The design dome epitomizes the future, and the innovation hub now marks its 70th anniversary.
"The new building piece of the Tech Center was completed last year, but the campus has been under renovation -- every lab, every office -- for ten years," Reuss said.
He said it was a $2 billion project, with the only new structure being the one he walked me through called "Design West," meticulously crafted to meld into the original mid-century modern campus created by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen, but with a focus on the future.
"This whole design center, you know, I'm not sure there's anything else like it in the world, but it's capable of productionizing every design from all of our satellite studios around the world," Reuss said. "Most importantly, we designed it to integrate engineers and designers on the same site in the same place to actually design to criteria and do it very rapidly.”
Reuss has been with the company for around 40 years, following in the footsteps of his late father, Lloyd, who was president of GM in the early 1990s.
Proudly wearing his dad's lapel pin, Reuss recalled how his dad had only wanted to work at GM after he'd visited the tech center on vacation as a boy.
"Before he passed away, I brought him out here, and we went through the Corvette studio, and then I drove him around the campus. It was almost done, and so it was great. I'm so happy I did that, so he loved it," Reuss said.
"A wonderful memory," I added.
After sharing some artifacts from GM's archives, Reuss shared some big news about a corporate giving pledge.
" You know, we've given $27 million coming out of a pretty tough time in the country and the company. And now we're looking at $50 million over the next five years into the Southeast Michigan STEM education piece of that," he said.
"What is the overall goal? What do you hope to see?" I asked.
Success looks like, in five years, a material change in the performance of testing and scores and reading. All of those fundamentals, okay, that we're not scoring well in," he said.
An investment in the future of education as GM's Tech Center actively aims to shape the future of mobility for the next 70 years and beyond.
Reuss said GM will work with educational leaders to identify where the $50 million donation will go to best support STEM education in Southeast Michigan. He said the company will start distributing the fit next year.
