Ford Cut Its Clay Sculptors' Work Time in Half. Now 80% of the Lineup Rides on It

Ford's clay modelers now finish a full-size design theme in five days — a job that took two weeks six years ago. Virtual reality and 3D printing did it, and the saved weeks feed directly into Ford's plan to refresh about 80% of its North American portfolio between 2027 and 2029, according to COO Kumar Galhotra.

The man at the center of it is John "Rex" Allen, 68, who has built life-size cars out of clay for four decades and now sculpts inside a VR headset upstairs at Ford's new World Headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. The building opened in November 2025 as what Ford Land CEO Jim Dobleske calls a 21st-century expression of Ford Rouge logic — teams stacked vertically the way Henry Ford stacked steel and assembly. Moving a car across the old design center took 30 minutes; it now takes "just over three minutes." Even the courtyard birdsong is fake, predator calls included, to keep Michigan's geese off workers' lunches. "Those are not real birds," Dobleske said. "That's all fake."

What does the turnaround actually look like?

Ford sold about 650,000 fewer U.S. vehicles than GM last year yet posted more revenue: $187.3 billion to $185 billion. The gap is Ford Pro, the commercial arm serving businesses and governments, which earned $6.8 billion before interest and taxes in 2025 at a 10.3% margin — more than double the $3 billion from Ford Blue, the gas and hybrid unit. The EV business, Model e, lost $4.8 billion.

In December, Ford announced roughly $19.5 billion in charges after all three Detroit automakers pulled back on EV strategies as federal subsidies disappeared — a shift CEO Jim Farley predicted would halve the EV market. GM was the only member of the Big Three to post a 2025 net profit; Detroit itself is 13 years past its bankruptcy.

How does Ford plan to fight China on EVs?

Galhotra said Ford's Model e skunkworks in California started by tearing down multiple Chinese OEM vehicles. "It was clear that because of the labor advantage and certain subsidies and battery areas, that their batteries are cheaper than ours," he said. So Ford designed around a smaller battery, with better aerodynamics, fewer frictional losses and more efficient motors. "In the end, we're pretty much equal in total system cost," Galhotra said of projections against BYD, calling it "first principles thinking."

The first vehicle on the Universal EV platform is the Fathom, a $28,350 midsize electric pickup due in 2027. Ford says it can push more than 10 kilowatts into a house during a blackout without the expensive wall-mounted inverter the F-150 Lightning required.

Why batteries led to a new business

Lisa Drake, the veteran executive now running Ford Energy, saw by around March 2025 that her battery plants "weren't full." Ford had already licensed lithium-iron-phosphate cells from China's CATL and was building batteries in Marshall, Michigan — chemistry that turned out to be near-ideal for utility-scale storage. "I had a license for the best tech on the planet and the right tech for storage," Drake told Fortune. In December the board gave her $2 billion to launch Ford Energy. She's retooling a Kentucky plant that made F-150 Lightning batteries, reusing 30% to 40% of the equipment, with production starting in late 2027. Target customers: utilities, renewable developers, and data-center hyperscalers.

Clay, printers, and the people in between

Allen fell into clay sculpting at 26 after leaving machining because "it started becoming robotic." He worked 100 hours a week at Detroit model shops earning roughly $100,000 a year — "Somebody told me they created cars out of clay," he said, "and I fell right into it." He's been at Ford 24 years and worked on the original Dodge Viper concept at a Chrysler satellite studio.

His team's process, called hybrid sculpting, runs: rough out the car in clay, scan it in about 20 minutes, refine in VR, let a mill carve the new surface over a few shifts, then finish by hand. "This one is leaps and bounds further than anything we've ever done," Allen said. He credits VR with keeping modelers employed: "We still have the same amount of work," and the team now flips more designs. Colleague Shawn Fairall pushes back on the obvious assumption: "Clay has never really gone away."

Four miles away at the 109-year-old Rouge Plant, 35-year-old Greg Foresi runs a 3D-printing lab with roughly a dozen machines and nearly 300 tools in his database. His blue factory-floor wheel — printed during a supply-chain gap, untested rather than guarantee a line stoppage — kept production moving on a line that builds a new F-150 every 54 seconds. Galhotra is blunt about limits: 3D printing is "good for patches here and there." Foresi agrees it's "not remotely close to replacing our conventional supply chain."

New C-suite arrivals Mike Aragon and Alicia Boler Davis, both Amazon veterans, are scaling AI across Ford Pro and digital services. Farley cited AI guiding technicians through a Super Duty engine removal — "a two-day job." Galhotra stays measured: on AI that changes how physical things get built, "we're at the beginning of that journey."

Allen nearly retired eight years ago and once steered his son Derek into engineering out of fear for modeling's future. Now he trains the next generation in both clay and VR. "I hop out of bed in the morning so I can come to work," he said.