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When the motor car was new, 120 years ago, hundreds of crazy young men in all corners of the industrialised world – including one Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan – fell to building self-propelled contraptions of their own design. 

These vehicles and their successes varied greatly, but when it came to naming them, the inventors all did the same thing: they used their surnames. By the time the Ford Motor Company opened for business in 1903, we had Daimler and Benz, Peugeot and Panhard, Renault and Opel, Dodge and Lanchester. Even Alldays & Onions. And more were waiting in the wings.

However, while companies run by their founders were once common, family and financial fragmentation now means they are rare. Porsche is still active, of course, but Ford is the only major car company to have been led and controlled by the founding family for its entire history (122 years and counting).

The architect of its survival in this guise is its current executive chairman for the past 19 years, William Clay Ford Jr, known far and wide as Bill.

When Ford’s charismatic big boss dropped into this year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed as part of a brief UK tour, accompanied by his sons Will (aged 34) and Nick (29), both of whom have recently been recruited by Ford Motor from busy careers in non-automotive businesses.

I grabbed the opportunity for a wide-ranging chat with all three. My first somewhat crude question – why are you here? – took us rather swiftly to the heart of their purpose.

The trio were at Goodwood to appreciate cool cars and trucks, they said, and to mark the all-important 60th anniversary of the Transit – the van that forms the basis of Ford’s thriving commercial vehicle business.

They were also contemplating what would be Bill’s first visit to Ford’s 2026 Formula 1 powertrain partner, Red Bull Racing – from which CEO and team principal Christian Horner had just been sacked. However, Bill also made it crystal clear that a big part of this three-man tour was about publicly living out the family heritage, embodying the family brand. 

For Bill, maintaining family control of the company isn’t primarily motivated by power or profit, even if such things are clearly important if Ford is to remain healthy.

Much of it is about maintaining the focus of his great-grandfather Henry, who, while roundly criticised for views that wouldn’t wash in today’s world, funded a vast array of philanthropic projects and believed, once the company began to thrive, that Ford’s purpose was to try to make the world better. 

Bill’s view – faithfully passed on to his own notably close-knit family of four children – takes the same direction. His philanthropic projects are many and varied too, but the best known recently is the £500 million-plus resuscitation of the vast Michigan Central railway station in Detroit’s Corktown district, active for 75 years but abandoned in the 1980s. 

Under Bill’s leadership, the company bought this mighty edifice for £75m in 2018 and has revived it as a 30-acre technology and cultural hub for business occupants such as Google and his own company. It opened last year, attracted 100,000 visitors in its first week and is already bringing much benefit to a depressed district.

“People said I was crazy to take it on,” says Bill, “but I felt it would be good for Detroit and Michigan, and for our employees who would work there. The community loves it.” Of course, there’s a harder-nosed side to promoting Ford’s family approach to management, and Bill tackles this with typical straightforwardness.

“The average tenure of a CEO these days is about four years,” he explains. “That means a company has to switch gears all the time: new CEO, new plan, new strategy, new team. I think our kind of ownership produces not just a sense of stability but a longer-term vision. In a world of nameless, faceless and in some ways dehumanised corporations, we’re not that.

"People know there’s a family there. We’re accountable. Our name is on the product. And they know we care deeply.”

To preserve Ford control, about 25 years ago Bill began holding quarterly meetings with family stakeholders aimed at pulling everyone together so the family interest – held mostly via special, voting shares – would be robustly maintained.

“Other family businesses implode, either by infighting or because of a lack of interest,” he explains. “I didn’t want our family interest just to ebb away, so we’ve been buying up the ownership of family members who aren’t so interested and then consolidating them in a smaller group. I’m pleased we’ve been able to hang this together, and I think it will continue well into the future.”    

Bill deals neatly with the idea of bringing his two sons into Ford at an effective level. It’s a move he knows is bound to attract criticism or comment in some quarters. His best utterance on this – that Ford should never be an employment agency for family members – has done much to deal with the sensitivities. 

This and his well-developed sense of duty to protect the company is why Bill has firmly required his sons, along with their older sister Alexandra, already a Ford director, to study for degrees at “good” universities – Princeton for Will, Harvard for Nick – and to spend at least five years building worthwhile careers in businesses outside the automotive world.

This plan works, says Bill. It protects the company, not least by allowing the new talent to fail or succeed somewhere else, regardless of their surname. “I didn’t have that,” he adds with some regret. “So for the early part of my career, I used to wonder: am I only here because of my last name?”

Nick Ford, the younger brother still in his first year at Ford, offers an intriguing insight into joining the family firm. “You know you shouldn’t have a bad day,” he says, “because everyone’s watching, for better or worse. It’s a big shift from working somewhere else and a great responsibility. But it’s a great honour as well.”

Nick, whose first five years was spent in management consultancy at Boston Consulting, is now part of a team that is building partnerships and developing Ford’s future enterprise strategy. Much of it is secretfor now, and for good reason, he says.

“The industry is in a sort of speed-dating period now, preparing for future challenges,” he explains. “What’s reassuring is that so many companies are lining up, wanting to do business with Ford. It’s testament to how well we are positioned and how strong our brand is.”

According to his father and brother, Will Ford has the job everyone wants. As general manager of Ford Performance, his task is to build and finesse Ford’s motorsport portfolio, working with global motorsport director Mark Rushbrook. There’s a Mustang racing “pyramid” now, he says, starting with a junior driving academy, rising through a one-make series for Mustang Dark Horse Rs to Mustang GT3 racing at the highest level.

Plus off-road racing, of course: in January he was in Saudi Arabia for the Dakar Rally. He loves driving the cars and lets slip that he’s a bit of a speed freak – but regrets that he doesn’t get to do as much racing as he would like. 

I ask about the objectives of the impending Red Bull visit but get little meat on the bone. It turns out Will visits quite often, even if Bill is yet to do so.

My facetious suggestion that the team might make good use of a bright, young, Ford-nominated American for its problematic second F1 seat is met with something of a dead bat. “Driver decisions are Red Bull’s,” says Will. “But they’re a collaborative partner in every way.”

Fearing that this might leave a chink of my suggestion still alive, Bill weighs in: “I’d rather see the team win than put someone we recommend in the seat.” Meanwhile, what is Nick’s view of cars and racing? Robust, it turns out. “When Will gets into it seriously,” he says. “I’ll take him on.” 

Given that Bill has been interviewed thousands of times and can anticipate the next line of enquiry better than the hack himself, he’s well prepared for the ‘European reassurance’ question. He starts answering almost before I’ve finished suggesting that Ford isn’t doing very well with cars in Europe at present.

Does the company still love Europe? Will it continue to be involved here? Will we see great cars like in the old days?

“Well, of course we’ll go on,” he says, pushing back on my accusation of poor performance with details of increasingly impressive sales of Ford Pro commercial vehicles. “On the passenger car side, we realise we’re not as robust as we need to be,” he admits.

“But as Nick says, we’re working on our future strategy right now. But I think you’ll be surprised – pleasantly surprised – by what’s coming.”

Bill had always seen the point of clean air and efficiency and was earning credibility as an environmentalist many years before it was popular. He cites the production of the pioneering Ford Escape Hybrid, fully 20 years ago, as one of his best achievements. Such an Escape, along with a battery-powered Focus, is in his personal car collection, which consists mainly of first-of-build Mustangs. 

The move to electrification remains important to Bill, and he has no doubt that it will happen. Indeed, it’s happening already. “What went wrong is that the regulators got out ahead of the customers,” he says.

“That’s never a good situation. In the future, electrification will play a very important role in transportation, but it won’t be the only part. The ICE business will be gradually phased out, but it won’t disappear. What happens will vary according to region.

“At Ford, we’ve invested in all of these clean technologies, and I feel good about that. But it’s down to customers. They want what they want, and it’s our job to give it to them.”