Mexico's Surprising Engineering Strength

As global automakers pour billions of dollars into their Mexican factories, Marcos Perez is trying to make sure the nation’s future goes beyond assembly lines. The head of product development at Ford Motor’s Mexico unit, Perez has helped the company almost triple its local engineering staff, to nearly 1,000, since 2010. His engineers have filed for 40 U.S. patents in the last three years, including one for a low-cost crash protection system that boosts safety ratings without adding much weight or cost. “It’s an inflection point,” Perez says. “We used to be a simple-assembly kind of country, and we moved to a truly core manufacturing country, where most of our assembly plants are hitting record numbers on productivity, on quality, on cost. Now we are transitioning from Made in Mexico to Designed in Mexico.”

In a cubicle at a Ford assembly plant on the outskirts of Mexico City, Gerardo Rodriguez, a 24-year-old mechanical engineer, is working on reducing noise in the Ford Fiesta, which is exported from the factory to the U.S., Canada, and Latin America. He participated in a Ford trainee program as an undergraduate at Universidad Iberoamericana and was hired two weeks before graduating. “I went into the program knowing almost nothing,” he says. “I knew quite a lot by the time I started working here.”