Here Is Our 2024 Autoweek Vanguard Award, Person

What are the reasonable expectations for the great-grandson of the man who put the world on wheels?

Should he follow in the family business and push the company toward new technologies for a future mobility model that is stable and sustainable, or should he take a simpler path that doesn’t require so much hard work?

Anyone who knows William Clay Ford Jr. very well—or has played ice hockey against him—knows he’s not afraid to stir things up, whether in the boardroom, on the plant floor, in a destitute neighborhood needing attention, or scrapping for the puck in the corners.

For his lifelong commitment to metro Detroit and to advancing the company cause, we celebrate Bill Ford Jr. as our 2024 Autoweek Vanguard Award, Person.

True, the 67-year-old executive chairman of Ford Motor Co. has been a visible presence within the company for decades.

At the age of 25, he saw the bare-knuckled side of the auto industry by serving on the company’s national bargaining team negotiating a new UAW contract in 1982. Bill Ford later helped develop a strategy to launch low-volume manufacturing plants in emerging markets.

Bill Ford Jr. was there in 1999 to support workers when a power plant at the Rouge complex exploded, killing six employees. He created the Ford Volunteer Corps, pushed Ford into hybrids and electric vehicles, and he led the environmentally focused renovation of the Ford Rouge center, which was the world’s largest brownfield reclamation site in 2004.

He even took the helm as Ford CEO during a tumultuous stretch that started with a $5.5 billion loss in 2001, followed by three straight years of profitability.

Yes, Bill Ford Jr. has checked a lot of boxes in his long career with the family business, and they were all necessary and perhaps even predictable steps along the way.

What was unforeseen, however, was his willingness to commit massive company resources—over $1 billion, by most estimates—to restore the grandeur of the Michigan Central Station in Detroit’s resurging Corktown neighborhood.

The dilapidated old train depot was so ramshackle that it needed very little dressing when it served as the apocalyptic setting for a titanic battle between two superheroes in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, when it was filmed inside and outside the 18-story building 10 years ago.

And yet, six years ago, Bill Ford Jr. stood on a makeshift stage in front of the rundown Michigan Central Station and announced ambitious renovation plans not only to remove a scar from the Detroit landscape but to create a broader campus of new buildings dedicated to research and development of autonomous and electric vehicles.

There was a big crowd outside the station that hot summer day in 2018, and skeptics figured something would derail these plans.

But six years later, after more than 3,000 artisans, historians, architects, craftspeople, and laborers poured all they had into this project, the station reopened to gobsmacked and appreciative throngs of Michiganders who came for an emotional reunion with a building that looked as good as new. Visitors shed more than a few tears at the transparent beauty.

It’s not just window dressing. The restored Michigan Central Station anchors what is a new mobility hub—an incubator for startups, some of which may have no automotive connection at all.

This is what Bill Ford wanted—not to put the Blue Oval on the reimagined train station but to create a space for inspiring young minds to pursue new ideas for a sustainable future.

By opening the doors to Michigan Central Station, he has welcomed thousands of wide-eyed kids and grandkids who may want nothing more than a chance to work there.

Was this a prudent financial move for Ford Motor Co.? Certainly not in the near term.

An automotive economist recently wondered why Bill Ford would spend so much company money on renovating the train station, because there’s no solid business plan to recover that investment anytime soon—sort of like the company’s bet on battery-electric vehicles.

But doing the right thing is not always about dollars and cents, and Bill Ford knows that community pride can be worth much more.

When your name’s on the Dearborn headquarters, you get to do stuff like this, which is better than retiring to a private island.