Why Michigan Central Station is the perfect place for our season launch
Ford has taken one of America’s most notorious abandoned buildings and turned it into a hub for innovation, engineering prowess and tech wizardry. Sounds like the perfect venue for the launch of a new car for a new F1 era…
Michigan Train Station illuminating Detroit
© Jason Keen / Ford
Back in the early 2010s if you had typed the words Michigan Central Station into an image search you would have been bombarded with hundreds of images of vast, eerily empty halls, crumbling façades and smashed windows.
Michigan Central Station, Detroit
© Getty Images/Flickr RM
Oscar Candon, Switch Backside Flip
© Kevin Metallier
Lee Plaza Hotel view
© Kevin Metallier
Michaël Mackrodt, Gap to Backside Five-O
© Kevin Metallier
Lee Plaza Hotel
© Kevin Metallier
Designed by architects Warren & Wetmore and Reed & Stem, the same team behind New York’s famed Grand Central Station, Michigan Central opened its doors in 1913 as one of America’s most spectacular transportation terminals. A beacon of early 20th Century American hyper-expansion, it welcomed 4,000 daily passengers at its peak, but as rail traffic slumped following the Second World War, the station’s fortunes also declined. In 1988 it was shuttered completely and by the time of its centenary the only people walking its vast halls were urban explorers photographing its faded Beaux-Arts facades and turning it into a crumbling emblem of post-industrial decay.
However, in 2018, things finally changed. After decades of severe neglect, weathering, decay and vandalism, the huge structure was bought by Ford, with the intention of bringing the ailing station back to its spectacular best. But renovating such a vast, imposing structure was no easy task and the numbers involved were staggering. To start with, the enormous basements beneath the station were flooded and almost 3.5 million US gallons of water (more than 13 million litres) of water had to be pumped out, and some 3050m3 of debris had to be hauled out of the building to allow work to get underway.
Once the site was cleared, all 8 million bricks that make up the station had to be carefully assessed and some almost 9,500 square metres of windows were replaced or restored. Additionally, 4,200 new light fixtures were installed, including re-creations of three massive chandeliers in the Waiting Room and Grand Hall. While restoring the building’s iconic Waiting Room and Grand Hall required the equivalent of 14km of grout used on the 29,000 Guastavino ceiling tiles alone. All but 1,300 of these tiles are original to the station.
The exterior of the Detroit hotel at Michigan Central Station
© Jason Keen / Ford
The work undertaken was also period correct. To source more than 540 tonnes of limestone, Ford and its partners located the same quarry in Indiana that provided the original stone for the station’s exterior. Like the station, the quarry had been closed for three decades and needed to be reopened for the project.
In all, more than 1.7 million hours were spent meticulously returning Michigan Central to its original grandeur, while retrofitting it with modern technology and infrastructure to support its new incarnation.
The station’s new era began in 2024 with Ford unveiling the architectural marvel as the centrepiece of Michigan Central, a 12-hectare technology and cultural innovation district with Ford’s autonomous mobility and integrated services division as its anchor tenant.
The view of Michigan Central Station from Roosevelt Park
© Jason Keen / Ford
Over the past two years more and more entrepreneurs have found a home at Michigan Central and at the end of 2025 some 2,000 innovators were working at the site across multiple start-ups, Fortune 500 companies, universities, artists, investors, and nonprofits.
Before and After: Michigan Train Station
© Jason Keen / Ford
The rebirth of Michigan Central Station has been a remarkable story of dedication, commitment and investment in a site that represents both the glorious past and exciting future of mobility and the city of Detroit itself.
Defined by technological innovation and a passion for perfection, it’s the perfect place to launch a new incarnation of the team as a complete car manufacturer, building both chassis and, in association with Ford, our first power unit, and to launch ourselves into a new era of F1 itself. Time to get on board.