Why does Ford still have an entire /8 (and even worse, completely unused)?
Longer answer: it doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things. I saw where someone did the math of recovering all the corporate /8s (assuming that there was a justifiable reason for repossessing address space that they requested and were allocated fair and square). It would extend the IPv4 timeline by like a month and a half.
IPv4 is used up, and it’d be exceptionally difficult and expensive to claw back subnets.
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.
Realistically, Ford may also have use their IP range in a kinda of haphazardly way, simply because they never had a shortage or had to deal with multiple public range. So cleaning up their network, to be able to free any number of IPs would be a lot of work, at a high cost, with no real benefit for the company. Sure they could sell the surplus IPs, but they aren't that strapped for cash.