YPSILANTI TWP. — The American Center for Mobility (ACM) has signed an agreement with London-based Intertek Group plc to provide operations and maintenance services on ACM’s 500-acre connected and automated vehicle proving grounds in Ypsilanti Township, set to open in December.
Intertek is a multinational inspection, product testing and certification company. It was created by a series of acquisitions in the 1980s and 1990s that united a British marine surveying business founded in 1885, a testing laboratory founded in Montreal in 1888, and the Lamp Testing Bureau founded by Thomas Edison in 1896. Intertek today is a network of more than 1,000 laboratories, employing 42,000 people in more than 100 countries.
Intertek has numerous Michigan offices, including in Detroit, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Kentwood, Lansing, Plymouth, Saginaw, and Troy.
Intertek’s Transportation Technologies Group specializes in performance, quality and reliability standards for the automotive industry. The company is accredited to conduct thousands of electrical, chemical, and mechanical tests for full vehicles, automotive components, products and related systems.
“We’re proud to partner with Intertek and to leverage their leading global expertise in delivering innovative and customized solutions within the automotive and communication sectors,” said John Maddox, president and CEO of ACM. “In our search for an operations and maintenance partner, we wanted to work with a company that would deliver the highest quality and customer-focused solutions for our unique facility. We’ve definitely found that with Intertek and we’re confident they will help us implement the very best safety and operational standards for ACM.”
Through the multi-year agreement, Intertek will provide several services to ACM, including overall center operations, testing security and confidentially systems, maintenance, local hiring, human resources management, ancillary services, customer service programs, training plans for clients, implementing an information technology policy, and safety planning.
“Intertek’s experienced professionals and technical know-how complement ACM’s vision to create a world class facility to test technologies across the connected and automated vehicle ecosystem,” said Ed Straub, ACM’s technical program director and chief safety officer.
Ralph Buckingham will be leading the project on behalf of Intertek, with site development support provided by Rich Jacobson, Intertek western operations manager; Greg Marshall, chief engineer; and an Intertek team with decades of proving ground, testing and Total Quality Assurance expertise.
More at www.intertek.com.
ACM is a non-profit testing, education and product development center for future mobility, designed to enable safe validation and self-certification of connected and automated vehicle technology, and to accelerate the development of voluntary standards. ACM is one of 10 U.S. Department of Transportation designated Automated Vehicle Proving Grounds in the nation. More at www.acmwillowrun.org.
ACM is part of PlanetM, a Michigan-focused collaborative of industry, government, and institutions of higher learning for advanced transportation. More at https://planetm.michiganbusiness.org/.