- Ford plans to embed its “Team Edison” at The Factory building in Corktown
- Team to develop business case for electric, autonomous vehicles
- Corktown seen as a big advantage
The business strategy of Ford Motor Co.’s big bet on a future of selling electric and autonomous vehicles will be devised inside a former hosiery factory in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood — a move that was driven both by the automaker’s ambitions to transform urban mobility and its employees’ desire to work in an urban setting.
Inside the multi-section building at 1907 and 1927 Michigan Ave. called The Factory, Ford plans to embed its “Team Edison” group of employees who are charged with developing the business and strategy for rolling out 16 fully electric vehicles by 2022, said Sherif Marakby, vice president of autonomous vehicles and electrification for Ford.
“From a mindset standpoint, it was a really nice fit with how we’re thinking … about the future of battery electrics and autonomy,” Marakby said in an interview last week with Crain’s at the North American International Auto Show.
The Dearborn-based automaker’s purchase of The Factory building marks the biggest re-engagement with the city where Henry Ford invented the assembly line a century ago since the last Ford workers left the Renaissance Center nearly 20 years ago.
Marakby, who will be based at the new Corktown office, was a college trainee in the early 1990s when Ford still occupied office space in the RenCen.
The 111-year-old Factory building, once the home to the Chicago Hosiery and Detroit-Alaska Knitting Mills factories, sits in the middle of a section of Michigan Avenue in Corktown that seems poised for more development spreading west from downtown and the redevelopment of the former Tiger Stadium site a block away.
Continue reading full article on Crain’s Detroit Business.
