#normal illinois

Excerpt from this story from the Washington Post:

When Mitsubishi closed its auto factory here in 2016, residents worried it would become another symbol of American manufacturing decline. Six years later, the plant is back in business with a radical Silicon Valley makeover.

The factory, now owned by electric-vehicle maker Rivian, employs 6,300 people — nearly twice as many as it did under Mitsubishi — and is aiming to produce 25,000 trucks, SUVs and vans this year.

Ensuring that the United States makes the leap to electrification is a key goal of the Biden administration, which sees rewarding high-tech jobs and lower carbon emissions on the other side. The White House and Congressional allies have backed the sector with new legislation that subsidizes EV purchases and charging infrastructure and incentivizes domestic manufacturing of the vehicles and batteries through tax breaks. Many states, including Illinois, are doing the same.

The measures are accelerating a sweeping retooling of the U.S. auto industry as manufacturers modernize old factories and break ground on new ones for the electric era. The outcome will decide which states maintain thriving manufacturing industries, and whether the United States remains one of the world’s auto powerhouses in the face of new competition from China and others.

The potential rewards for communities like Normal are clear, but there are many unknowns, including how many jobs an electrified industry creates compared with the gasoline-powered era, how quickly consumers embrace vehicles selling for an average of $66,000 and how smoothly manufacturers ramp up production.

General Motors this year pledged to spend $7 billion — its largest investment ever — on four Michigan manufacturing sites for battery cells and electric vehicles. It’s also making big investments in EV and battery factories in Ohio, Tennessee, Canada and Mexico.

Ford and South Korea’s SK Innovation plan to invest $11 billion in new manufacturing campuses in Tennessee and Kentucky that will employ 11,000 people to make vehicles and batteries. Tesla recently opened a giant factory in Austin; Stellantis and Samsung are spending $2.5 billion on a battery plant in Indiana, and Mercedes-Benz in the coming months will start producing electric SUVs at its retooled facilities in Tuscaloosa, Ala.

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This is a good story about how Normal, Illinois, and the Bloomington-Normal metro area, is experiencing a revival after the electric vehicle manufacturer, Rivian, purchased the abandoned Mitsubishi auto assembly plant in Normal, renovated it to produce the initial two Rivian vehicles, and is getting set to deliver its first vehicles.

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

As it prepares to deliver its first electric pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles this year, Rivian has spent around $1.5 billion renovating and expanding a factory once owned by Mitsubishi. On a typical day the 3.3-million-square-foot plant hosts several hundred construction workers alongside more than 2,500 workers employed by the company, which expects to eventually double its local head count.

The effects are hard to miss in Normal and nearby Bloomington, a metropolitan area of about 170,000. Hotels are frequently booked up, pandemic or not; hundreds of housing lots are being developed; and many employers looking to hire a full-time plumber are basically out of luck.

“At Rivian, we’ve heard they’re hiring a lot of licensed plumbers,” said Lori Stickling, who operates a plumbing company with her husband. “We’ve had a post up for months with no qualified candidates.”

In recent years, makers of electric vehicles and their components, like Tesla, Lucid Motors and Lordstown Motors, have collectively spent billions building or renovating factories in Nevada, Texas, Arizona and Ohio.

The challenges are enormous, given that few of these companies have brought a vehicle to market. But if some succeed, the impact could be many times greater than the thousands of manufacturing jobs they create directly.

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