How Ford plans to take its Michigan headquarters into the future

By Stephen Edelstein Published April 12, 2016

Ford product campus rendering — Image used with permission by copyright holder

The last major upgrade of Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan, headquarters was done when tail fins were all the rage, and computers filled up entire basements. Roughly 60 years later, the Blue Oval is undertaking a massive overhaul to not only upgrade aging infrastructure, but also provide a testing ground for things like self-driving cars and e-bikes.

The rebuild will take 10 years and involve the renovation of more than 7.5 million square feet of workspace, Ford says. It plans to consolidate work spaces for 30,000 employees into two main campuses: A “product campus,” and an administrative campus built around the current Ford World Headquarters building.

Recommended Videos

The “product campus” will be built around the existing Ford Research and Engineering Center Campus, which was dedicated by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953. It currently houses 12,000 employees, but will eventually accommodate 24,000 with the planned upgrades. That includes a new 700,000-square-foot design center Ford says will be the focal point of the campus.

Ford will also use this part of the campus to test technologies under its “Smart Mobility” banner. That includes self-driving cars, e-bikes, and on-demand shuttles to get employees across what will still be a very large space. Bike paths, walkways, and green spaces will link the various buildings. The buildings themselves will get updated connectivity hardware, plus geothermal heating and cooling, and rainwater capture and automated metering to save water.

The upgraded Ford World Headquarters campus will be based around the 1956 headquarters building. As with the product campus, buildings here will get connectivity upgrades and changes aimed at lowering the campus’ environmental impact. Ford also plans to stitch these buildings together with green spaces, including the renewal of an arboretum that was started in 1960.

Speaking of green, Ford also plans to build a “Sustainability Showcase” onsite. This building will aim to meet “Living Building Challenge” standards, including net zero waste, energy, and water. It will do that with geothermal heating and cooling, as well as solar power. Other buildings will have increased insulation, more efficient lighting, and heat recovery to reduce energy use, and will implement measures to save water.

Construction of the product campus begins this month, and is expected to be completed by 2023. The majority of work on the world headquarters campus will begin in 2021, and will be completed by 2026.

Topics

Stephen Edelstein

Contributing Editor

Stephen is a freelance automotive journalist covering all things cars. He likes anything with four wheels, from classic cars…

Cars

Here’s how EVs charge as they drive on a stretch of Michigan road

Tech of the Week Electreon

Charging remains one of the biggest hurdles for mass EV adoption. Public charging infrastructure still isn’t extensive enough to merit driver confidence, and even the fastest chargers still require lengthy stops compared to refueling a gasoline car. But the State of Michigan and Israeli startup Electreon hope to prove that EVs can charge as they drive.

As detailed in a recent CleanTechnica explainer, the Michigan Department of Transportation is demonstrating in-road wireless charging hardware from Electreon on a quarter-mile stretch of 14th Street in Detroit. It’s being billed as the first such roadway in the U.S.

Computing

How Intel and Microsoft are teaming up to take on Apple

An Intel Meteor Lake system-on-a-chip.

It seems like Apple might need to watch out, because Intel and Microsoft are coming for it after the latter two companies reportedly forged a close partnership during the development of Intel Lunar Lake chips. Lunar Lake refers to Intel's upcoming generation of mobile processors that are aimed specifically at the thin and light segment. While the specs are said to be fairly modest, some signs hint that Lunar Lake may have enough of an advantage to pose a threat to some of the best processors.

Today's round of Intel Lunar Lake leaks comes from Igor's Lab. The system-on-a-chip (SoC), pictured above, is Intel's low-power solution made for thin laptops that's said to be coming out later this year. Curiously, the chips weren't manufactured on Intel's own process, but on TSMC's N3B node. This is an interesting development because Intel typically sticks to its own fabs, and it even plans to sell its manufacturing services to rivals like AMD. This time, however, Intel opted for the N3B node for its compute tile.

Cars

Here’s how Ford will give EV customers Tesla Supercharger access

Ford EVs at a Tesla Supercharger station.

Ford announced last year that it would adopt the Tesla North American Charging Standard (NACS) for EV fast charging, granting Ford drivers access to the Tesla Supercharger network. Now, the automaker is providing a little more detail on exactly how that will work.

In the original May 2023 announcement, Ford said owners of existing EVs — which use the Combined Charging Standard (CCS) instead of NACS — would be able to charge at Supercharger stations via an adapter. Today, the automaker announced that the adapter developed by Tesla is now available to order. EV owners can order one free adapter per vehicle through Ford's website between now and June 30. The adapter will otherwise retail for $230. Ford plans to begin building new vehicles with NACS connectors in the near future.