Great Dane breaks ground on technology facility

Ground was broken Wednesday, April 4, for research facilities at the corporate headquarters, said officials with Great Dane trailer maker in Savannah, Ga.

The complex will serve as a hub for the trailer maker’s engineering and design initiatives.

“Over the past 30 years, the tremendous work done by Great Dane’s entire engineering team has yielded countless cutting-edge innovations in materials and products that have advanced the entire trucking industry,” Great Dane President and CEO Bill Crown said. “Today, we celebrate these accomplishments by breaking ground on a new Engineering and Technology Campus.”

The campus will include the renovation of the current corporate office space and three new-construction buildings that will be LEED certified. The U.S. Building Green Council says the certification means that spaces will be designed and built to achieve high performance in sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality.

The 30,000-square foot engineering building will include a conference center, customer preview showroom and will house an area with interactive, hands-on educational displays demonstrating the trailer maker’s products and materials.

Research and Development will receive a new 27,000-square foot building to accommodate a manufacturing engineering lab for building custom fixtures and testing automation equipment. The corrosion lab will also be housed there , as well as testing facilities for large and small-scale components, quality assurance and thermal efficiency. A separate building will be erected for the maker’s full-scale road simulator capable of testing trailers, truck bodies and buses. Full-scale automated trailer floor fatigue testing will also be done in the facility.

The groundbreaking follows Tuesday’s opening of a production plant in Statesboro, Ga.

For details, visit Great Dane Trailers.

 

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