Ford has a serious marketing problem when it comes to hiring.

It's pretty obvious that Google, Facebook, et al. spend a lot of energy and money marketing themselves as fantastic places to work with great pay and benefits.

Most non-tech companies don't spend this effort. Ford might pay well, but they don't spend effort properly marketing themselves as a great place to work. Part of this is that tech culture != Ford culture and many people might not like Ford's big business culture.

Probably because of this weird Midwestern attitude towards salaries.

An engineer earning a $250k+ salary is seen as greedy in these parts. You can witness this from Michiganders right here in this thread. There are a few posts here about how $250k is a ridiculous salary in Michigan and is completely unnecessary.

Ford will likely go bankrupt or be acquired if they fail to stay competitive in autonomous vehicle research. Since there's only a handful of people in the world capable of keeping them relevant, these people are worth literally billions of dollars to Ford and trillions to the Michigan/Ohio/Indiana economies.

Ford should have no problem paying these people millions and advertising that fact.

It's decades of unions that have led people to believe that there should be a certain sense of equality when it comes to wages. It's a ridiculous idea in the creative economy.