This Ford sculptor has carved cars out of clay for 40 years. AI and VR just cut his work time in half

Detailed summary

Ford’s latest rebirth includes factories filled with 3D-printed parts and clay-carving artisans wearing virtual-reality goggles.

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…

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