LUNCH WITH THE FT: Motor chief Bill Ford on a Rust Belt reboot for the driverless age
The great-grandson of Henry Ford tells Patti Waldmeir why we’re not ready for a post-car world yet and why cleaner cars just mean cleaner traffic jams
"I’m sure your father doesn’t remember me," says Bill Ford, the great-grandson of Henry Ford, scion of one of the oldest industrial dynasties in American history and head of one of the most successful automobile companies of all time. William Clay Ford Jr, executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, may be what passes for royalty in the "Motor City" of Detroit — but he’s not quite sure he’s memorable enough to have made an impression on my father, a Detroit newspaper columnist for decades. We are sitting in the penthouse atop Ford’s famous Glass House, a giant, glazed rectangle viewed as modern when it was built in the 1950s and adorned with turquoise panels that will probably require a few more decades to qualify as stylishly retro. Ford says he considered blowing it up around the turn of the last century, admitting that the 1950s are considered by some the "low point of American architecture". Instead it’s being renovated. Let’s hope they start with the penthouse dining room here in...
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