It’s all part of that pivot. In early 2015, the company set its scheme in motion, launching 25 experiments. Some of them were fairly conventional (backup power for electric cars), others a bit daft (a “monsoon helper” for Mumbai drivers), and others seemed lifted from the business plans of recent startups (various apps for parking, ride sharing, and data collecting). All of them revolved around that mobility concept, using apps, data, and exotic tech to enhance and build on the experience of transportation, often in ways that minimize or even eliminate the good old American practice of a single driver getting behind the wheel to gleefully burn fossil fuel. The motorcycle sensors and the shuttle are the first graduates from that class of experiments.

Mark Fields, who has been Ford’s CEO since July 2014, contextualized Ford’s push to become not just an automaker but a mobility company by using the example of Apple and Nokia. Only Apple successfully built a broad customer experience and robust ecosystem. “You can become extinct when you only focus on the hardware,” he said.

The company’s other big news, which actually involved selling cars, was that Ford was investing an additional $4.5 billion in electric vehicles, with the goal of having electrified options for 40 percent of its “global nameplates.” (This isn’t the same as having 40 percent of its cars electrified, but it’s a pretty big step for an American automaker.)

It was ironic that Ford’s CEO and not its executive chairman was making those pronouncements. Those themes — electrification and mobility — were ones that Bill Ford has been touting for years, and using all his influence to bring to his family business. It hasn’t been easy. Because Bill Ford is both the auto industry’s ultimate insider and its singular apostate.

From boyhood, he loved cars, down to their smelly, greasy, smog-belching innards. But time spent in the wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula gave him a love of nature. When he went east for his higher education — Hotchkiss, Princeton, and, later, an M.S. at MIT’s Sloan School — his professors confronted him with the incompatibility of those passions, citing his family business as a profiteering wrecker of the planet. Ford has always believed that his great-grandfather’s vision transformed America positively, by giving people the freedom to travel and by paying workers fair wages. But he knew the professors had a point.

As he moved up the ranks of Ford, he vowed to do things differently. Many in the company viewed him as a dangerous radical. But when he became CEO in 2001, he struggled when pressured to temper his idealism with pragmatism. He did try to shift the fleet to small cars and hybrids, but was forced to compromise and at times was stymied by his subordinates. It seemed there was no way to run an auto firm in the early 2000s without building fleets of SUV’s and pickup trucks.

He was sharp enough to realize that there was much to learn in Silicon Valley, a culture seen as diametrically opposed to that of the auto industry. Ford caused a minor panic in Detroit in 2005 when he decided to serve on eBay’s board. (Meg Whitman, then its CEO, had been a Princeton classmate.) This wigged out some of the Ford directors, who had assumed he would serve on a board of a Fortune 10 company. “They had never even heard of [eBay],” says Ford.

Serving on eBay’s board, he saw one unlikely commonality between the tech world and the car world. “To me, Silicon Valley is an interesting culture, but in its own way it’s every bit as insular as the Detroit culture has been accused of being. There’s a feeling that if something doesn’t originate in the Valley, it’s not worthwhile.”

Getting to know Silicon Valley led to Ford’s early exposure to some of the auto-related activity there. For instance, as soon as he picked up the buzz about an advanced electric-car company called Tesla, he reached out and asked to see it. Hosting his visit was Tesla’s CEO at the time, Martin Eberhard, who had heard disparaging reports about Ford’s intellect. He found them groundless. “Incredibly smart guy,” he says. “He was really bright and fairly knowledgeable about electric cars. I asked him what it was like being CEO of an automaker. He smiled and said it was kind of like being handed the helm of the Titanic.”

Ford test-drove an early Telsa prototype. “It was unrefined but, man, it was fun,” he says. He told Eberhard, “I think your technology is fantastic, but there is a difference between being a technology company and a car company, and some of the prosaic things about being a car company you may not find terribly interesting but you’re going have to do, like parts supply, servicing, logistics—all these things that customers will want and take for granted.”

(My own view is that Detroit is dancing with denial with this argument. Anyone who spends a few minutes in a Tesla gets that it’s different from other cars — more a delightful digital device than a cabin pulled by belching engine — and even those who aren’t “car people” experience object-lust. If Apple enters the business, as rumored, get ready to multiply that feeling by 10. But when I asked Mark Fields about Tesla, he called it “a nice car,” and began peeling off the same imperious notes that Bill Ford did: “I don’t want to sound arrogant,” he said, “but it takes a lot to manufacture a car — logistics, design, dealership, marketing….” Certainly he can’t presume that Apple doesn’t know how to handle a supply chain, or market its wares.)

In the years Bill Ford held the CEO post, company performance sagged. The stock price tanked, and red ink was tallied in the billions. In 2006, he resigned, turning over the job to former Boeing executive Alan Mulally.

But one might argue that some things he set in motion, however belatedly, helped position the company for the future. (His supporters note that an SUV hybrid he did bring to market, the Ford Escape Hybrid, was named American Truck of the Year in 2005.) When the economy collapsed two years after he gave up his post, Ford was the sole major U.S. automaker that didn’t need a bailout. (Much credit was due to his successor, who took on $23 billion in debt and ordered a huge workforce cut.) Ford has now been profitable for 25 consecutive quarters.

He pointedly remains active as chairman, however, and claims that arrangement has worked just fine, first with Mulally and now with Fields.

“I mean, I was the CEO,” he says. “I know what that job is. I know what my strengths are. So I don’t want go back to that. Done incorrectly it could create, I suppose, fighting and everything else. But I’m not going to let that happen.”