Virginia Gov. rejects Ford battery plant over connections to China

[Richard]

Batteries are heavy and expensive to ship,in the future when the government incentives and funding dries up the only ones that will be left will be the ones that are located as close to the auto manufacturers in order to remain competitive.

There are really only a couple of states,where the manufacturers are located,where they make sense.

Not sure why other states are fighting over something that they know will be here today and gone tomorrow,there is a million other forms of manufacturing that we should be also fighting for to establish in any state.

Look at how many fought over the big Amazon thing,ready to kick in 100s of millions and look at how many Amazon warehouses are closed or scheduled to be closed in the future.

What side of the isle they are on is irrelevant,money grabs does not need to make sound financial sense long term,they just have to look good to the voters in that moment in time.

EV batteries are over 1000 # on average and EV semi's are hitting the 12,000 # range,that’s just the battery.

It is borderline insanity to be putting battery factory’s anyplace else but next door to the factory producing the vehicles or as close as possible.

Kinda defeats the energy savings,when it is offset by transporting millions of # of batteries across multiple states.

This is just the government using battery factories and the hopes of landing one in order to say - look we are trying to provide good paying jobs,when they know full well there are really only 3 states in the country where they would make long term economical sense.

Michigan does not need to compete for a battery factory or give away the store in order to get one,because the stockholders will look at the numbers and apply basic economics.

It is easy to pretend you are fighting that good fight,when it is already a guaranteed thing.

GM teamed up with China long ago,not sure why Ford or GM even have to in the first place,outside of China is currently the largest EV manufacturer in the world and controls much of the related ingredients in raw materials.

They may be forced to team up simply to excess to that supply chain or to prevent China from undercutting them in the future,legacy costs put GM and Ford at a disadvantage from the start.

30 years down the road,or up , I really do not see Ford or GM existing in a big capacity,China already has over 500 EV manufacturers and has the capability to build millions of EVs ready to go right now.

So we are in the 1920s while they are in 2050 when it comes to all of this.

In 2021 China produced 3.5 million light duty EVs the United States 540,000.

While our capacity has increased every year,so does theirs,by the millions compared to our 100s of thousands.

China currently has the capacity to build 26.69 million EVs per year and are only operating at 5.1% production rate.

They are the largest battery manufacturers and biggest investors in battery production across the world and also consume 50% of battery production.

I do not like American companies investing with Chinese,but it looks like they have no choice now,to bad everybody laughed when somebody said- now is the time to be locking down the raw materials sources before China does,they won and now we get to pay the price.

When the dust settles,battery factories are not going to save anybody,they have already become economically obsolete before even they are built.but we get to have fun cutting checks for billions in the meantime it’s almost like playing the lottery.