Ford was in early enough that RFC 1918 wasn't a thing, and those address were used internally, using something else would have be rouge. If I recall Ford also had 20/0.0.0 at one point in time as a dev/staging network. Source: working at ford in 96 and they had been on IP networking long before I arrived.

Same with General Electric and the 3.x. It was sold it to AWS a few years back, introducing the burden of internal re-addressing.

Before cloud providers/FANG behemoths, these were some of the largest networks around.