In the automotive industry, solid surface effects are encountered in areas such as exhaust gas catalysis and sensing, corrosion, adhesion, friction and wear. Transition metals are involved in all of these types of interfaces. Our surface and interface physics programs are designed to characterize relevant physical phenomena in the atomistic sense. Transition metals are characterized in large part by their d‐electron behavior. The localized nature of the d‐orbitals has necessitated the formulation of a self‐consistent local orbital method in order to compute surface electronic structure. Results for the (100) surfaces on work functions agree well with experiment. We found a surprisingly large density of surface states, i.e., localized to the surface region, on palladium, copper, and silver. One‐fifth to one‐fourth of the electrons in the surface layer are in surface states on these metals. A prominent surface state band found theoretically on copper has subsequently have been observed by Heimannetal., and Kevan and Shirley via angular photoemission. It is clear that henceforth surface states will have to be considered in the analysis of physical and chemical processes on transition metal surfaces.