7/18/2018 Zack Fishman
Edward Hightower is a successful automotive engineer with a newly released book.
Written by Zack Fishman
Edward Hightower always loved cars. As a kid in Chicago, he would help out the neighborhood mechanics and learn from his scoutmaster about truck repairs. Moving into high school, he picked up math and science skills, and he decided to pursue engineering to work with the vehicles of his passion. Three decades later, Hightower has built a multifaceted career in the automotive industry where he has built, marketed, and even written about the vehicle that has long inspired him.
His career as a lead engineer and business executive began in Urbana-Champaign, where he was accepted into the General Engineering program in 1984. (“General Engineering” has since been renamed “Systems Engineering and Design”.)
“I felt that the General Engineering program at the time would give me a strong, cross-functional, technical education that would suit my desire to work on a product as complex as an automobile,” he says. “The University of Illinois was one of the top engineering schools in the country, so I felt blessed to have the opportunity to go there.”
Hightower credits his time at Illinois working on hands-on projects in a variety of engineering disciplines with preparing him to work with automobiles — complex machines made up of 30,000 interacting parts across seven subsystems, he notes. When not busy with the General Engineering curriculum, he served as president of the Black Greek Council as a Kappa Alpha Psi member, held additional membership in the National Society of Black Engineers and the Society of Automotive Engineers, and was a Fred H. Turner Fellow.
Following graduation, Hightower worked as a chassis engineer for General Motors, the first of many positions he would hold in the automotive industry. To scratch his longstanding entrepreneurial itch, he received his MBA from the University of Michigan in 1995 and used his fresh understanding of business concepts to take on greater responsibility at work.
“My time on the engineering side and my time on the business side allowed me to hold roles like Chief Engineer at Ford, and Executive Chief Engineer at General Motors,” Hightower says. In these roles, he was “responsible for both the technical performance of the vehicle as well as making sure the vehicles were developed to meet the needs of the customer.”
As Executive Chief Engineer in particular, he was responsible for seven crossover car models — such as the Cadillac SRX and Buick Enclave — worth $15 billion globally, along with cross-functional teams in the United States, Latin America, and East Asia.
In 2011, Hightower further embraced the business side of automobiles by founding Motoring Ventures, a firm that both invests in and advises midsize manufacturing companies. He uses his expertise from the highly competitive auto industry to assist clients in their operations. “I've found that their performance can be improved very quickly by applying many of the disciplines and processes that are standard in the automotive industry,” he says.
Already an esteemed engineer and business owner, Hightower also became an author this year with the release of Motoring Africa: Sustainable Automotive Industrialization in April 2018. The book, says Hightower, is “an actionable roadmap for automakers and other manufacturers to participate in what many consider to be the world's next emergent growth market opportunity: the African continent.”
From a summer he spent in Ghana while attending graduate school, he saw and continues to see potential for an explosion of the automotive industry in many African nations. As support for his prediction, he cites Africa’s expected population boom from 1.2 billion people to 2.5 billion by 2050 as well as its currently low production capacity of one million automobiles per year, dwarfed by the 29 million of similarly sized China.
Aimed at business leaders, investors, and entrepreneurs “looking for growth that also has a positive impact on the world,” Motoring Africa also emphasizes the importance of sustainability in industrial growth. “‘Sustainable’ means that business will succeed over time and that it will have a positive impact on both the environment and community,” says Hightower.
Beyond the subject of his book, he notes several other trends that present major changes to the future of car-making. Among them are the growing electric vehicle market, the prominence of ridesharing through apps like Uber, and the accelerating effort to make self-driving cars a reality. Immersed in such an active period of change in a longstanding industry, Hightower shows enthusiasm for what the future may hold.
“It's an exciting time to be in the automotive industry,” he says.