The ground level of Michigan Central Station, Bill Ford’s near billion-dollar love letter to the city synonymous with his family name, is a before-and-after picture for the ages: a ruined, graffitied Beaux-Arts shell meticulously restored to glorious columned spaces with glowing limestone, enormous windows, and tiled vaulted ceilings. A futuristic light sculpture occupies the former concourse area, where passengers once bought tickets and rushed for trains, or emerged from trains into a new life in the North, while the grand hall across from it is an event planner’s dream.
When the 18-story structure was completed in 1913, it was the tallest train station in the world. That height offers 21st-century possibilities. They fly drones over the 14th floor (the Federal Aviation Administration gave Ford Motor Co. air rights), and the upper four stories will house a hotel eventually. But “we’re still trying to figure out what to do with the roof,” Ford says from a glass-walled conference room in newly completed office space on the ninth floor. A young 67, he’s still the bright-eyed, quick-to-smile guy who used to beam out of TV sets in the 2000s when he was the CEO and the public face of Ford Motor Co. “Because there’s no building of this size around, you can see downtown, all the way to Lake Erie. I mean, it’s incredible.”
Bill Ford is good at seeing what’s on the far horizon; it runs in the family. For years, he drove past the derelict station, “and it really made me sad and even angry.” He used to sit on the board of eBay, but every time he visited Silicon Valley, “it really reinforced to me there were so many interesting things going on in the world, and none of them were happening here.”
Then one day, when he was driving past the dark, hulking train station on his way to the city, “it came to me: ‘Whoa, we can invent the future here.’ It’s not just the restoration of a wonderful building; it’s also about what we were going to use it for: to help invent the future of mobility, how things move, how people move.”
And about the electric energy that powers it all. The 30-acre Michigan Central “innovation campus” abutting Corktown includes, among other things, America’s first electric charging road, which is currently undergoing testing. The train station’s companion piece is Newlab at Michigan Central next door, a former Albert Kahn-designed post office turned abandoned book depository, which Ford bought along with the station and saved from ruin with a great industrial-chic overhaul. It opened in April 2023, and today 122 companies are ensconced there, developing and building electric-powered vehicles and inventions of all sorts. It’s not just a hub but a mind hive buzzing with brain power — a carbon-neutral reinvention of his great-grandfather Henry Ford’s entrepreneurial legacy, fueled by venture capital.
If Newlab is the laboratory, the station is the lounge. The breathtaking main floor will have restaurants and bars, coffee shops, and retail spots — all the better to lure and keep top-drawer tech talent. “We can say, ‘This is your workplace, and these are the problems you’ll be solving,’” Ford says. “They want a great place to work, and they want a great lifestyle.”
Indeed, some of these Newlab businesses may join Google here in the station’s office tower. Ford envisions the companies born at Michigan Central staying in Detroit and often talks about “where we can grow small companies into bigger companies. … These are companies that make things. They need maker space and, sometimes, big maker space. Well, guess what? Detroit’s got plenty of space. And we know how to make things here.”
Perhaps Michigan Central is Ford’s way of solving a problem that’s dogged him most of his life: how to square his twin passions for gasoline-powered cars and a healthy planet. His love of the environment earned him scorn in the hallways of Ford Motor Co. back in the 1980s, when he was fresh out of Princeton and climbing the ladder in the family firm. This was back when Ford’s uncle Henry Ford II was spearheading the construction of the Renaissance Center, his own attempt at bringing people and business back to Detroit.
In the early 2000s, as Ford ascended the ladder, he made good on his beliefs. Ford Motor Co. produced the Ford Escape hybrid, the first hybrid vehicle built in the U.S., as well as an eco-centric reconstruction of the historic Rouge factory in Dearborn, complete with solar panels, the world’s largest green roof, and a power system that converts paint fumes to electricity.
Ford is a lucky visionary, with the resources, connections, and reputation to turn dreams into reality, especially when it comes to combating climate change. He has the ruddy cheeks of an avid outdoorsman; he loves fly-fishing so much he named his venture capital firm Fontinalis Partners, after Salvelinus fontinalis, the scientific name for brook trout. He plays competitive pond hockey in the winters, but water doesn’t freeze up like it used to when he was growing up in Grosse Pointe and skating on Lake St. Clair. It’s the same lake where his great-grandfather Henry Ford set the land speed record in 1904. The same lake Ford and his father, the late William Clay Ford Sr., chairman of Ford’s design committee and owner of the Detroit Lions, flew across in their iceboats.
Ford chuckles when he remembers how his dad “didn’t know what he was doing. We’d smash into the seawalls and everything. You need thick ice to do that because those things are heavy.” He used to skated on the lake “reliably from Thanksgiving to April. Not anymore.”
Late September, in the station’s grand hall, Bill Ford was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame, along with five other “global mobility pioneers,” for his “pivotal role advancing the industry while positioning an iconic, global, 120-year-old family company for the future.” He was also honored for his forward-thinking environmental views and relentless cheerleading for Detroit’s comeback. In conjunction with the grand opening of Michigan Central, his wife, Lisa Vanderzee Ford, led an effort to raise $20 million to establish endowments for 10 local family charities in coordination with the Children’s Foundation, their longtime philanthropic partner.
The father of four has a gift for connecting with people, and that’s what he loves most about this project: how people bring their own history to it. The best part of the grand opening concert, for him, “was just looking out at all the faces and everybody was smiling, you know? And after everything this city has gone through over the last 50 years, to look out and see everybody having such a good time — I loved that. This station is bringing people together in a way that makes me really happy.”
So what’s next on the horizon? He’s thinking about it. He drives the streets of the city’s empty neighborhoods, imagining what can be done. He supports a return of the Super Bowl to Detroit. He knows the next big thing will come to him.
In the meantime, he’s got a car company to oversee. For the executive chair, job one is guiding the company through the ever-shifting and highly competitive electric vehicle market.
“The opportunities and the challenges are different for each generation,” he says, “but the values themselves are timeless: taking care of each other, taking care of our communities, being there when the country needs us. I hope those continue after me. You can’t take it for granted, because I find that when management changes over, sometimes there’s not a clear handoff of that. And I have to step in and remind people that no, this is who we are and this is what we stand for. And we’re going to be different from other companies.
This story originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, including the full list of the 2025 Hour Detroiters pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on Jan. 6.
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