A few years back I filed for a provisional patent and received…

A provisional application never matures into a patent and has no enforceable rights. For an invention to receive a patent, a utility application claiming priority to the provisional one must be filed within one year. The provisional application is not examined for patentability and simply is abandoned 12 months after the filing date. This time period allows the inventor to assess the marketability of the invention and secure the resources necessary to pay for the acquisition and maintenance of a patent. Therefore, an applicant who files a provisional application must file a corresponding non-provisional application for patent during the 12-month pendency period of the provisional application in order to benefit from the earlier filing of the provisional application. However, you can still apply for a patent after the 12 months, but you just won't get the earlier priority filing date of the provisional application, so your best bet is to get a non provisional patent on file asap.

One problem is that a provisional application can be cited against you in a later utility application. Patent applications are published 18 months after they are filed. This means that if a utility application that claims the benefit of the provisional application is not filed, the information in the provisional will be deemed public. While there are ways to prevent the publication of an application for which no foreign rights will be sought, I don't know if you opted out of publication. From the time your provisional is published (or any other public disclosure of your invention), you have only one year to get your patent filed.

It's true that you don't have any patent enforcement rights against Ford, because you don't have those rights until your patent is granted, but you can still go after them for misappropriating your invention and proprietary/confidential information. I hope that you had a confidentiality/Non-disclosure agreement in place before you disclosed your invention, if not then you may be out of luck, but a witness would help. In any case, you can challenge them if they file and obtain a patent on it on the grounds that they are "not the inventor"...based on your disclosure to them, but this would have to be done through a "reexamination" procedure.