This Ford sculptor has carved cars out of clay for 40 years. AI and VR just cut his work time in half
Nick Lichtenberg/Fortune ‘Somebody told me they created cars out of clay’ The Ford modeling studio is massive, with ceilings 25 to 30 feet high and a wide-open, blank space that feels like an empty Hollywood studio, awaiting a Gilmore Girls set or a replica of the Titanic.
Key points
- Allen, with his thin white mustache complementing his mane of white hair, is doing what he’s always done: building cars out of clay.
- Upstairs at Ford World HQ, Allen is looking at his clay cars, his monitors, his plastic models and his virtual reality glasses.
- 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.
At that time, Detroit had a dense web of small model shops that handled overflow work for the Big 3 — Ford, General Motors and Chrysler (now Stellantis), along with their suppliers — and Allen worked at a half-dozen of them.
Additional details
- “Somebody told me they created cars out of clay,” he explains, “which I had no idea of, so he introduced me to a guy that owned a business.
- “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.
- “I used to be a machinist, and then it started becoming robotic, so I got out of that business real quick.” He reasoned that he’d always been a “bit of an artist,” and in high school loved comic books and cars and ran a side hustle airbrushing the “Rat Fink” mascot and other Kustom Kulture motifs onto T-shirts for other kids.
- 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.
- 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.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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