Bill Ford talks about Ford’s future in Detroit

And as I was driving back and forth to The Factory, a couple of things struck me. One was how quick the trip was down Michigan Avenue from Dearborn. But also, I’d always had this vision that we would build the future of Ford Motor Co., particularly as it pertained to autonomy, we needed to do that in a city setting – because that’s where these vehicles will be deployed, and that’s where we need to really try them out. And so, I would drive by the train station and I started asking myself, ‘What it? Is this fantasy?’ I came back and talked to Dave Dubensky, who is head of Ford Land, and said to Dave, ‘You know, what would you think if we made a move on the train station?’ And Dave is incredibly open-minded, thankfully, and we talked about it. But it was predicated on a couple of things. One, does the deal make sense financially? Because if it doesn’t, we’re not going to do it. And two, what kind of shape is this building really in? Can it be renovated? Structurally, is it sound? And then what kind of time frame are we looking at? … And could we get this deal done relatively quickly within the bounds of what we’d consider a really good business deal? So all of those things had to be answered before we got the greenlight.”

But I must say, I started getting excited about this deal probably in the last three months or so, because we were negotiating with Matt Moroun, and he was terrific. And we never really hit any stumbling points with Matt along the way, which is obviously also important. So that’s kind of the timeframe, if that helps.

MARTINEZ: So you mentioned that you would see it as a symbol of Detroit’s decay. What do you want it to become? What will it be for Ford Motor Company?

FORD: Well, I’ll tell you, if all it is an incredible renovation of an iconic building, that would be great. But it’s going to be much more than that. … To put a little symmetry around all of this, Detroit is where Ford Motor Co. began. And when Henry Ford was building the Ford Motor Co., it was sort of like the Wild West then in terms of, it was like Silicon Valley today – there were lots of companies being formed, lots of them failing, there was a great debate over what would be the next propulsion system: Would it be steam? Would it be electric? Would it be gasoline? All of that was created in Detroit. And so here we are now and we are again reinventing the future of transportation, just as it was done 115 years ago. And that, to me, is going to be the power of this building, is that it’s not just going to be a standalone, beautiful building. It will very much be part of the fabric of the new transportation model. And our future at Ford will be largely invented there. And it will become, I believe, a really wonderful magnet for talent, because nowhere else in the country can anybody, will anybody, be able to work in a setting like that and in a Corktown community like that.

And, of course, you know sort of the family history, which also provides some interesting symmetry for me in terms of Ireland, my relatives coming over during the potato famine. Henry’s father William and his father John came over in that period. And since we’ve announced this, I’ve gotten some emails from Cork, Ireland, saying, ‘This is awesome because we had relatives come over and settle in Detroit during that period.’ Of course, that’s not why you do it. But it’s all part of the tapestry of this story. And then of course, there’s this transportation corridor from Corktown to Dearborn, keep going … the airport, Willow Run and Ann Arbor. … It really becomes, to me, a really interesting transportation invention corridor.

We do plan to run shuttles in between Corktown and our Dearborn campus – and maybe further west to Ann Arbor.

MARTINEZ: The Chariot shuttles?

FORD: The Chariot for sure. Could be others as well. They may not start off immediately as autonomous shuttles, but they eventually will be AV shuttles. Don’t know if those will be Chariots or not. Haven’t put too fine a point on it. We’re talking four years out now.

LIVENGOOD: How many employees are you envisioning, Ford employees in Corktown?

FORD: “So, we’re thinking in this building about 2,500, and there’s room for about 5,000, we think. So then you’d say, what’s the rest of it going to (be). So the rest it. I would love for this to be like the Sand Hill Road of Michigan, where entrepreneurs, startups, partners all want to come and be part of this creation process. That would be amazing to me – and I think that can happen. Because the future of mobility should be created in Detroit – and I believe it will be.”

LIVENGOOD: Could you envision having other automakers there?

FORD: Uh, I don’t know. I wouldn’t. In the train station or in Corktown?

LIVENGOOD: Yeah, in the train station.

FORD: I doubt it. Never say never, I suppose. And if we have partners, sure, why not? I’m not sure another OEM would want to be there unless we were actively in partnership with them. And if that were the case, sure.

The building itself is going to be amazing. One of the inspirations I had was I was out in San Francisco and went through the ferry terminal out there – and it’s incredible. It is a gathering spot for people in the city. Yes, some of them are taking the ferry. But many of them are just there to meet friends and family. There’s really fun restaurants. There’s really fun retail, coffee shops. All of that envision that being the ground floor of the train station – completely open to the public. And my vision, it would be a place where people would meet family and friends, hang out, and then do something fun in Detroit – whether that’s a ballgame or the DIA, or something else, it could be anything, go to dinner. Although they could probably have dinner in the train station, if they would like. But there are plenty of other great restaurants around too.

One thing that’s very important to me is that this is not seen as a corporate takeover of Corktown. So we’re going to spend a lot of time, engaging the community, asking them what they would like in the facility, are there activities they would like to be part of in this facility, what things would they not like to see happen in the facility. And how could we make this a great enhancement to Corktown and the quality of life of people around there, rather than this becoming a corporate island. That’s not what will happen here. And we’ll have other facilities in Corktown too. And so everything I just said for the train station is true also of whatever we do in Corktown. It’s really important that we become part of the community and that we’re not isolated or insulated from it.

LIVENGOOD: So you see the concourse of the train station being a community gathering spot?

FORD: Yes, very much so.

LIVENGOOD: Where people could step off and experience Detroit?

FORD: And have fun. I want this to be, and believe it will be, a really fun destination for people – both Detroiters and people coming in from outside of Detroit. It would be great if this was one of their first stops. It would be a great place to meet friends and family and then go from there.

MARTINEZ: So do you plan on running, using trains?

FORD: Well, we can’t do (that). It would be great. I’d love that if that ultimately were to happen. Obviously, that’s not really within our control. If that happened, it would just add the quality of the experience. If we ever do get regional transit here, which I’m a big proponent of, you can image the AVs talking to the trains, talking to the buses and all of the transportation systems working together. In that respect, it would actually help our development if we had trains coming in.

MARTINEZ: Any other teams? You mentioned mobility, autonomous.

FORD: We really don’t – we’re saying four years – we don’t really know. We’re saying 2022. I wouldn’t put too fine of a point on that because one of things we know about renovation is you don’t know what you don’t know. And you get in there and we could run into (problems). And we’ve tried to factor that in. So, you know, talking to Dave Dubensky, he’s saying, “Well, yeah, four years, 2022, let’s just put that out there. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong.’ But so much could happen in four years. But clearly the intent. So we’ve already said that our Dearborn campus build-out is continuing and our headquarters still is going to be in Dearborn. For instance, our PD teams will be co-located here in Dearborn. Could we have some PD people attached to autonomy down there? Yeah, potentially. We haven’t put too fine a point on this yet. But, directionally, that’s right. Not just the hardware around AVs, but if you think about all of the businesses that are going be developed – a lot of which we haven’t even thought of yet – that would probably take place down there as well.

LIVENGOOD: The book depository building, what will become of that?

FORD: I’m not sure. We don’t really know yet what the use is going to be for all of the facilities. We have what we call the brass factory. What’s it called, Alchemy? Is that the real name of it?

LIVENGOOD: Have you bought The Alchemy yet?

FORD: Have we bought it? I don’t know.

LIVENGOOD: You’re going to?

FORD (chuckling): We’re thinking about it. We’re close.

LIVENGOOD: We heard you were.

FORD: We’ve got other facilities down there. We’ve got, what, 1.2 million square feet down there? And we haven’t yet laid out a master plan for who’s going where and what it will all look like. But clearly the intent is we will have a – certainly it won’t be a self-contained campus, and that was never going to be the point. But we’ll have a big presence there where our employees can move around to facility to facility and then get back and forth to Dearborn very quickly.

MARTINEZ: This seems to fly in the face of the trend of automakers opening up AV development offices in Silicon Valley. I know you have Palo Alto.

FORD: We do, but it’s interesting, Michael, if you think about AVs and what it entails. Palo Alto was never meant to be an AV development center. … That certainly was part of it. But it was meant to get into the heart of Silicon Valley, get to know entrepreneurs there in all aspects of everything that might touch our business. And we’ve done that. We have greenfield labs out there, which we develop ideas for. But the actual testing really needs to be done through city streets. You can do a lot through simulation, but you also have to actually have miles under your belt. And we will be making some announcements as this year goes on about our EV plans. We’ve been a little quiet. And I’ll tell you why – we’ve been working really hard on it, but there’s so much hyperbole in the AV space. So many claims being made. And one of the things that’s really important to me is that Ford is a trusted brand. All of the research shows we’re a very trusted brand. And as such, I don’t want to participate in all of the chest-thumping and, you know, sort of, in some ways, wild claims to be made. Because that really would undermine our ability to be a trusted company. So we have been understated, and it’s important that we’re not ready to go public with things until they really are ready for prime time. And you’ll hear more of that as the year goes on. … Some of which may be pertinent to the train station, so of which may not be.

MARTINEZ: So potential testing in Corktown?

FORD: Yeah, for sure. I don’t know when.

LIVENGOOD: But you foresee deploying autonomous vehicles from the train station?

FORD: Sure. But don’t get carried away. It’s not like we’re going to wake up one morning and we have a hundred vehicles blasting through the metro area. I think initially these things work well when they’re geo-fenced and lower speeds. So you start to imagine maybe shuttles going back between our Corktown campus and our Dearborn campus. That may be the first step. And then as we gain confidence and experience, we’ll start to branch out from there.

LIVENGOOD: What’s the business case for buying an old derelict building that’s been sitting empty for 30 years?

FORD: Remember, we’re getting lots of incentives that will help, too. But I’ll tell you what the business case is. And I think it’s a pretty strong one. First one of all, we’re in a war for talent. And there will be no place in the country that anybody will be able to work that’s a place like that. That means beautiful Silicon Valley campuses … none of them will have something like this. It’s a very important branding thing for Ford. It’s also important in terms of our intent. We wouldn’t have done it if the cost didn’t make sense. We simply wouldn’t have done it. We’re spending no extra money than we already had in our forward budget. In 2016, we laid out a campus transformation plan internally, and we budgeted that for the next 5 years. This fits within that budget. There was no new money we had to add to accommodate this. What could have been one of the derailers? Certainly the condition of the building, but also the business case. If we didn’t get this on the right terms and feel we got the right incentives and feel this made really good business sense, we wouldn’t have done it.

LIVENGOOD: What’d you pay for the building?

FORD: I’m not telling you. Ask Matt (Moroun).

LIVENGOOD: How much do you envision this will cost? Any estimate of renovating the train station?

FORD: Uh-huh.

LIVENGOOD: Do you know that number?

FORD: Yes.

LIVENGOOD: Do you not want to tell us today?

FORD: Not particularly, no. Because we wouldn’t tell you what we were spending to renovate world headquarters. These are internal business things. But I’ll tell you the incentives were very important, and I’ll tell you we wouldn’t have gone ahead with this had this not been a really good business case for us.

LIVENGOOD: Do you know what the incentives are worth?

FORD: Yeah.

MARTINEZ: There were some questions, in light of Jim’s focus on operational fitness. Is the ability to recruit talent enough to satisfy why you don’t just dump that money into another SUV program?

FORD: Well, it can’t be either/or. You do need to have modern facilities. If you go around our facilities in Dearborn – this is why we did the master plan in 2016 – they’re very antiquated. There’s been a lot of years where we didn’t spend money when we could have and should have. It seems like every time when we got to the point we wanted to, we’d hit a downturn and the easiest thing to cut … that’s why when we hit ’16, we put this money into forward years, and we were not going to touch it. Because, you know, we need modern facilities. Ford does. Then you say, ‘OK, if that’s the case, why didn’t you build something new in Dearborn or renovate a Dearborn building?’ Well, that’s the cost that we compared this to. The cost of new construction somewhere else or the cost renovation somewhere else and this came out favorably when you added it all up.

LIVENGOOD: Is the train station redevelopment a completely Ford Motor Co. project or is there family stake in this?

FORD: Nope. It’s all Ford. … This is all Ford Motor Co. The whole Corktown thing is. I can tell you my family – my four kids and my wife – I mean, we talk about this a lot – they’re thrilled. But there’s no participation.

LIVENGOOD: Up to 5,000 (working in Corktown), this is going to be major influx working in this neighborhood, there’s already, a lot of demand to live there. … Is Ford going to get into residential development?

FORD: No, absolutely not. We don’t know how to do that. That’s not our business at all. … But I do know in a couple of years there’s going to be a lot of housing coming (online). …

LIVENGOOD: Do you think this project could be transformational in developing North Corktown or some other areas that are vacant?

FORD: I do. I think this can and will be a catalyst for lots of other development, most of which we won’t participate in, but that’s fine. I’m really happy if this is an important spark for the city and for that part of the city. We were just talking earlier, there’s this new (restaurant) right on the corner, part of the (Two James) distillery, there’s a new restaurant just opening up literally right next to the train station. They’ve got to be thrilled. Their timing was perfect. …

LIVENGOOD: Good fortune.

FORD: Yeah, exactly. Smart, I guess.

MARTINEZ: Was it a mistake to leave Detroit and get out of the RenCen? Do you guys regret that move?

FORD: Oh gosh, that was so long ago. I wasn’t part of any of that. … I just don’t know. I don’t think RenCen would have been ideal for us in terms of what we want to do now, in terms of a campus and connecting. This really works for us well in a way another facility downtown just couldn’t. Both the fact that it’s proximity to Dearborn and the fact we will have other properties in the neighborhood and the fact that properties were available. It all lined up in a way that makes this really attractive to us.

MARTINEZ: What was that first conversation like with the head of Ford Land when you suggested the train station?

FORD: Dave’s a pretty open-minded and progressive guy. He was excited, but sobered by the prospect. I said to Dave (Dubensky) right from the start, ‘Look, I don’t want this to be me … willing this to happen against good judgment. So you need to be very cold-eyed when you look at this. And if you need to come to me at any point and say ‘Bill, this does not make sense, here’s why,’ then I need to know that.’ There could have been several points along the way where we hit that. We didn’t, obviously, because here we are. But I asked Dave to really be the voice of not just reason, but skepticism in this. And he did the negotiation with Matt (Moroun).

MARTINEZ: And they were receptive, the Morouns?

FORD: Yeah, I never met with his father. I did meet with Matt, who was great.

LIVENGOOD: Did you have a relationship with (Matt Moroun) before?

FORD: Not really, no. I knew him and I knew of him and we had mutual friends, but no, I didn’t really know him. … But he was great to deal with.

MARTINEZ: We’ve seen some historic photos of Henry at the train station. Do you have any memories (of the train station)? 

FORD: I do. … I was a young boy. I remember our family took the train to California. I remember walking in, just taking a look and saying, ‘Wow.’ But I also remember the riots. Look, I’ve seen Detroit at its best and at its worst and one thing that I hated was when the national media was writing, over the last 15 years, about the decay of Detroit, the poster child for that was always the train station. That was always included as the visual in so many of those stories. That always really bothered me. Because I remembered as a young boy when it was amazing. They kept using that as a metaphor for what happened in Detroit. I’d love to turn it back into a metaphor for again what’s happened to Detroit.

MARTINEZ: You said walking in as a boy being awed, can you describe, was it like Grand Central Station?

FORD: … I talked to my mom the other night about this. And she remembers vividly. She used to go to New York all the time on the train. She has a much sharper memory of what it was and the hub that it was of life and activity. She said it was fun because you’d leave Detroit, you’d go to sleep, and you’d wake up and you were in New York. She remembers that vividly. I would love it to become that kind of hub again where people just use it as a congregating place. And that will be great for our employees working there, too. And we’re already seeing that in Corktown. The teams that are down in The Factory – my daughter’s actually down there and she loves it. They all do because of the energy, and then they go out into Corktown and they’re part of a community. That’s really fun.

FORD: … Obviously, there’s Slows and Astro Coffee …. and Bucharest Grill. All these fun places to take advantage of. And my guess is there will be more. … Of course, the old Lions office. When I was a boy, my dad’s office was right across from Tiger Stadium … until we moved to Pontiac.

LIVENGOOD: Do you see this as your legacy?

FORD: Don’t put the shovel on me yet. I’m hoping that I have a little bit of a runway yet, and I certainly wouldn’t like this to be my final act. But it is important to me for all the reasons we’ve been discussing. It’s really important for the city, and that means a lot to me. It’s important to our company, because it’s really where the future will be created. And it’s really important to me to provide the kind of space for our employees that they will feel energized and inspired by. I don’t really think in terms of legacy. I supposed at the end people will think what they think and write what they write, and I have no control over that. 

But I think of the three buildings I’ve been intimately involved in: first the Rouge, which I poured my heart and soul into and at the time got a lot of criticism for, (but) then in the end people said, ‘Wow, this is great.’ And then Ford Field. I remember being called into the office of a very prominent Detroit businessman who said, ‘If you do this, it will be the biggest mistake you ever make. Your fans won’t come to Detroit, they won’t feel safe, you won’t get the police support.’ And obviously that’s turned out really well. And now this. But this dwarfs them all, in my opinion, because of what it means for the future.

MARTINEZ: Your great-grandfather had an appreciation of history. … What would he think of this?

FORD: … I think he’d be thrilled. But I think he’d be thrilled not just with the renovation part – although I think he’d love that – but I think what he’d really love is the signaling of the future. It would probably feel very familiar to him, back to the beginning of Ford Motor Co., when it was wide open, there were lots of competitors coming in and nobody had quite figured it out, yet. That is where we are today, and I think that would have felt very inspiring to him.

(Cross talk about parking in Corktown.)

FORD: It would be really, really awesome if we could get light rail coming in there and passengers using that as a corridor.

But I do want to emphasize that we’re not leaving Dearborn. Our headquarters will be here. The vast majority of our employees will be here. And we are going to continue on with our build out of the Dearborn campus. A few people have said to me, ‘Oh, wow, what does this mean for Dearborn?’ It means that we’re continuing on. I always hate this, it sounds so trite, but it really is a win-win for Detroit, for Dearborn and, frankly, for our employees. 

LIVENGOOD: Before you arrived in Corktown, were you guys looking at new construction in Ann Arbor?

FORD: We looked at a lot of things. We looked at other facilities in Detroit, we looked at land elsewhere, we looked at more Ann Arbor space – we already have some there. We looked at everything. This really seemed to be the confluence of everything we were looking for. We did look, and have looked, at a lot of different locales. But the synergy of this with our existing campus, with the ability to shuttle back and forth and do all of the things we want to do just makes overwhelming sense.

MARTNEZ: I know you mentioned the idea of having suppliers or partners in there with you. I know it’s early days, but do you have anybody agreed to?

FORD: We don’t. As you might imagine, we’ve gotten a lot of inbound calls since the Morouns made their announcement, and I suspect we’ll get more after next Tuesday when we really go public. But we don’t really know yet what this is all going to look like. So we don’t want to react too quickly. We’re thrilled people are interested. But we’re just sort of kind of giving them a wait-and-see kind of thing. One thing I do want to do though, on the ground floor, is make sure that we work with people who know how to curate a great experience. Whether it’s Hudson Yards in New York or the ferry terminal in San Francisco, there are people who really know how to put together wonderful experiences with the right mix of restaurants and coffee shops and retail and all the stuff we don’t know how to do really well – it’s not what we do. Really want to make this a really fun and interesting destination for people, one they couldn’t get elsewhere.

FORD: … This is going to be great. I’m really excited.

MARTINEZ: Are you guys going to have the big Blue Oval on it?

FORD: It’s funny you should ask that. I know Matt said that in his comment. I don’t know. Probably not. With whatever we do we want it to be within the taste of the building. In an old historic building like that I don’t want to put some jarring new thing on. As I think about signage, could we do it on the building? Yeah, but what would it look like? We have to make sure it has to really fit. Could we do it next to the building on the ground? Maybe. Not really sure yet.

LIVENGOOD: Do you intend to change the name of the building?

FORD: I don’t know. I doubt it. People will call it the train station anyway, right? … I think that’s all TBD what we actually name it, if we name it at all. And I have no idea. Haven’t given that one minute of thought. But people will always call it the train station. I think that’s just what it is.