Chris Reed, Nissan's newly appointed r&d chief for North America, says a top order of business will be expanding the tech center's work in electronics and software as Nissan moves deeper into vehicle electrification, autonomous driving and connectivity.
"We're shifting what the core competencies are," Reed said in an interview this month. He was named senior vice president, research and development, at Nissan Technical Center North America in April.
Reed has seen plenty of change at the r&d hub. The Detroit-born veteran was the first American engineer hired there after Nissan set up shop as a three-person operation in Michigan in 1988.
Since then, the company's regional r&d footprint has expanded into a large tech center that employs 1,200 people, with satellite offices in California and a test track in Arizona.
An additional 800 people in Mexico also now fall under the tech center's umbrella.
Reed went on to work on the original Nissan Quest minivan, then developed as a joint venture with Ford, and was eventually sent to Japan as chief engineer of the third-generation Murano crossover.
Reed is now responsible for all vehicle engineering and development in North America.
His operation is only one-tenth the size of the global r&d center in Japan, but it is still big enough to manage 14 vehicle projects. Looking ahead, the center's work will increasingly change from mechanical to digital, Reed said.
"You think about electrical and software engineering, that's what's really driving the future," Reed said. "That's how we're shaping the business and the types of jobs we're going to be doing in the future. It is definitely a transition. We're looking at totally new skill sets."
Case in point: Tailoring Nissan's ProPilot semi-autonomous self-driving system to American roads. The North American tech center has already tested and tweaked the first generation of ProPilot for such nameplates as the Rogue crossover and Leaf electric vehicle.
It is now doing the same with ProPilot 2.0, a second-generation system just launched in Japan that enables pure hands-off highway driving from on-ramp to off-ramp.
The effort requires millions of miles of validation on U.S. roads to capture unique regional driving habits.
"That's not just a copy and paste from Japan," Reed said. "We fed back a lot of unique points that are required for our market. That will only expand and multiply as we look to ProPilot 2."
