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John “Rex” Allen is 68, wears cowboy boots, a black baseball cap, and he’s spent four decades building life-size cars out of clay. These days he builds inside a virtual-reality headset, too.
He does his work upstairs at Ford Motor Company’s gleaming new headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, where the bird sounds in the yard aren’t even real. Just over four miles away, the 109-year-old Rouge Plant looks much the way it did in the 1920s, except with 3D-printed parts patching the factory together and a “Green Roof” overhead that is one of the world‘s largest.
The new Ford World HQ opened in November 2025 as a 21st-century expression of the Ford Rouge logic, according to Ford Land CEO Jim Dobleske. World HQ stacks modern teams vertically the way Henry Ford stacked steel and assembly at the Rouge. It used to take 30 minutes to move a car from one end of the old design center to the other; now it takes “just over three minutes.” The birdsong in the courtyard is piped in, predator calls included, to keep Michigan’s ever-present geese away from workers wolfing down their lunches. “Those are not real birds,” Dobleske said, “that’s all fake.”
Fortune visited Ford in 1947 to document the “rebirth” of the company, when founder Henry Ford died and his grandson, Henry Ford II, was leading the postwar modernization of the iconic American manufacturer. Nearly eight decades later, Detroit as a whole is 13 years on from its historic bankruptcy process, but General Motors was the only member of the “Big Three” auto firms to post a net profit in 2025.
All three OEMs, or original equipment manufacturers, announced major pullbacks in their electric-vehicle strategies in 2025 as the federal government scrapped subsidies, prompting Ford CEO Jim Farley to (accurately) predict that the EV market would be cut in half as a result. In December, Ford announced about $19.5 billion in charges and pivoted to another rebirth: a race against the calendar.
Upstairs at Ford World HQ, Allen is looking at his clay cars, his monitors, his plastic models and his virtual reality glasses.
‘Somebody told me they created cars out of clay’
The Ford modeling studio is massive, with ceilings 25 to 30 feet high and a wide-open, blank space that feels like an empty Hollywood studio, awaiting a Gilmore Girls set or a replica of the Titanic.
Allen, with his thin white mustache complementing his mane of white hair, is doing what he’s always done: building cars out of clay.
Like most Michiganders who still work in auto manufacturing, Allen has an unimpressed air about his remarkable, unusual career. Asked how he joined the ranks of elite auto sculptors, he explains that he felt forced into it by fear of automation. “I used to be a machinist, and then it started becoming robotic, so I got out of that business real quick.” He reasoned that he’d always been a “bit of an artist,” and in high school loved comic books and cars and ran a side hustle airbrushing the “Rat Fink” mascot and other Kustom Kulture motifs onto T-shirts for other kids. Sort of a Mickey Mouse by way of R. Crumb, Rat Fink was a neon-green rodent mascot that exemplified the proto-punk vibes of Southern California car culture of the 1960s, but Allen said his tastes also ran a bit less gonzo — he used to carve Disney characters out of wood and clay for extra credit in art class, along with watercolors and oil paintings for extra credit in art class. “I made good money in high school,” Allen shrugs. “I loved doing that stuff.”
