Bill Ford Jr. – Crain’s Newsmakers 2018 – Crain’s Detroit Business

Bill Ford Jr. shocked the Blue Oval’s closest observers in 2018 when he engineered Ford Motor Co.’s purchase of a ramshackle 105-year-old train station in Detroit.

The executive chairman of the Dearborn-based automaker set the course for Ford’s return to the city where Henry Ford founded the company 115 years ago with the $90 million purchase of the Michigan Central Station from the Moroun family and a $350 million rehabilitation of an iconic symbol of Detroit’s 20th century rise and decline.

Bill Ford Jr.’s play for the train station and the surrounding Corktown neighborhood is an ambitious, if not audacious, bid to build an urban campus to compete with Silicon Valley for top minds to reinvent the industry his great-grandfather revolutionized more than a century ago.

Ford Motor’s purchase of other properties in Corktown to build out a 1.2 million-square-foot campus for the development of autonomous and electric vehicles of the future was seen as a legacy-building move by Bill Ford Jr., whose uncle Henry Ford II built the Renaissance Center in the 1970s in his own bid to revitalize Detroit.

But the 61-year-old scion of the Ford family sees the depot project as a strategic move in the “war for talent.”

“When we develop this Corktown campus, there will be nothing else like it in the country,” Bill Ford Jr. said in an interview with Crain’s. “Silicon Valley is literally spending billions to create these campuses — and they’re lovely, some of them. There’s nothing that will have not only the historic value and the coolness factor of Corktown, but frankly the practical application of creating an (autonomous vehicle) corridor from Detroit all the way out to (Ann Arbor).”

The $740 million real estate development project shifts money Ford Motor intended to spend on office space and facilities in Dearborn to Detroit instead. State and local officials raced to give Ford nearly $240 million in tax breaks over 30 years to secure the project.

Now the automaker’s structural engineers, architects and construction managers are developing a master plan for bringing the depot back to life in what’s expected to a be complicated rehabilitation of a building that sat vacant for 30 years.

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Bill Ford Jr. is confident the project won’t get mired in cost overruns.

“We think we have a pretty good handle of what we’re getting into,” he said. “But we also — both in the budget and time line — made sure that we accounted for the unknown. The reality is when you do start stripping a building down, you will find things that you hadn’t expected.”

With the opening of Ford’s first Corktown building — The Factory at Michigan Avenue and Rosa Parks Boulevard — the automaker has planted about 200 employees working on the deployment of autonomous and electric vehicles inside a one-time hosiery factory.

They’re the first of 2,500 employees Ford has committed to locating in Corktown once the train station and former Detroit schools book depository building are renovated. Ford also is planning to build a new 500,000-square-foot building on Michigan Avenue, adjacent to The Factory. 

Bill Ford said the company is using The Factory to recruit computer engineers and employees with other highly coveted talents to develop the artificial intelligence that will propel AVs up and down Michigan Avenue.

At the same time, Ford’s train station rehab project is attracting interest from suppliers and potential partners for mobility technology that want to set up shop in Corktown, according to the company chairman.

“We’ve been holding them all a little bit at bay because … we have to figure out our own needs,” Ford said. “To say we have been overwhelmed I think would be an understatement.”

While Bill Ford has been immersed in the Corktown project, the automaker announced in April that it is dumping much of its lineup of four-door sedans, keeping just the iconic Mustang muscle car in its North American production.

Bill Ford Jr. is quick to defend the move in the face of criticism that a company that put the world on wheels is killing off the American car.

“We are a company that listens to its customers — and our customers have been telling us that the demand for a different silhouette is higher,” Ford said. “We’re building upon what customers are telling us that they want.”

Compact and sub-compact SUVs sit higher off the ground and have more usable interior space, but often have similar powertrains and engines as sedans, Ford said.

“The underpinnings are still the same, it’s just that we’re giving more practicality to what’s built on the underpinning,” Ford said. “And if for some reason tastes were to change back (to sedans), we could respond to that.”

Entering the new year, 2019 marks Bill Ford Jr.’s 20th anniversary as chairman of the company, his 31st year on the company’s board of directors and 40th year working in the family business.

Ford CEO Jim Hackett is expected to detail his massive overhaul of the company’s operations to shed $11 billion in costs over several years.

“We are going to be making a lot of news,” Bill Ford Jr. said. “This is a very dynamic business. And you would expect us to have a very active news-making year next year — and we will.”