Eric Bellmer has seen how tough the car business can be. He was working at a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, when it closed in 2019, devastating the community.
Mr. Bellmer, an industrial mechanic, got a second job at a GM transmission factory in Toledo, but his commute is now 140 miles each way. His schedule gives him few hours with his family and few hours of sleep.
Yet far from bitter, Mr Bellmer says he is upbeat. GM is converting its factory to make electric motors, part of an industrial transformation that will redefine manufacturing sectors and jobs around the world.
GM, Ford Motor and other car makers announced investments of more than $50 billion in new factories in the United States last year, according to the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Plant for electric vehicles and batteries.
Mr. Bellmer is one of thousands who will also have to learn new skills. “It’s just a small part of the learning curve,” he said at the Toledo factory. “But our people are well equipped to handle it.”
Mr. Bellmer and Ohio are the architects of how the transition to electric vehicles will play out. GM, Jeep, Honda Motor and parts manufacturers employ thousands of people in the state.
Ohio produces more internal combustion engines than any other state, making the adjustment especially urgent for electric cars. About 90,000 people work for car manufacturers or parts suppliers in Ohio, and many more are employed by the businesses that serve those automakers and their families.
The changes are putting Ohio at the forefront of a new technology that is critical to fighting climate change. But some jobs will become obsolete and some companies will go bankrupt. It is an open question whether there will be more winners than losers.
“This is the biggest change in our industry since its inception,” said Tony Toti, president of the United Auto Workers local that represents GM workers in Toledo.
rise of electric vehicles
- Lithium prices: Drops in the price of essential battery materials, along with other items, are making electric cars more affordable. But experts disagree about how long this will last.
- Volkswagen: The German automaker said it would spend $193 billion on software, battery factories and other investments as it aims to make every fifth vehicle sold electric by 2025.
- Bulking Up: Electric vehicles are generally a more climate-friendly option. But as they get older, their emissions savings and other environmental and safety benefits start to wane.
- Tesla: The Biden administration said the company would open some of its fast chargers to all-electric vehicles by the end of next year, which were exclusive to its customers.
Mr. Totti is optimistic about his local members. But he’s worried about other colleagues whose jobs are tied to gasoline engines, he said.
“There is an expiration date on those facilities and those communities,” Mr. Totti said.
Warren in eastern Ohio knows what happens when a carmaker leaves town. In 2019, the city lost a third of its population, about 20,000 people, after GM closed a factory that produced the Chevrolet Cruze sedan in nearby Lordstown.
Even before that shutdown, auto production jobs were declining. US automakers and their parts suppliers employed nearly one million people at the end of 2018, down from more than 1.3 million in 2000. In the years before GM closed the Lordstown plant, it had reduced shifts and outsized its work force.
“Our biggest export for the last 20 years has been talented young people,” said Rick Stockberger, president of Bright Energy Innovators, an organization in Warren that provides work space, mentoring and funding to start-ups.
Today things are looking a bit better. Altium Cells, a joint venture between GM and LG Energy Solutions, is expanding production of batteries near the shuttered factory.
Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn has taken over an old GM plant and plans to make electric vehicles and tractors there. The campus will also feature an “electric vehicle academy” set up by Foxconn and Youngstown State University to train employees.
This boom in investment is helping to revitalize the well-planned but sleepy downtown of Warren. Mayor Doug Franklin, who works for GM in Lordstown, said he was happy to step into a local restaurant recently, where “I didn’t know anybody, because we had so many new people.”
Mr. Franklin represents the optimistic view – that an industrial renaissance is underway. The pandemic and supply chain chaos have led companies to make the leap to remotely produced components. That experience, as well as the billions in federal subsidies approved by Democrats last year, spurred manufacturers to build vehicles, batteries and other components in the United States.
“We’re seeing a new level of hope that I haven’t seen in decades,” Mr. Franklin said.
But community leaders in Warren also know the transition comes with risks.
Hopes that the old plant will become a buzzing electric vehicle factory haven’t panned out yet. GM sold the factory to Lordstown Motors, a new electric pickup truck company, which ran into trouble and sold the plant to Foxconn.
Executives declined requests for interviews at Foxconn, which has long assembled electronic components but little experience building cars. It is unclear when the company will mass-produce electric vehicles at Lordstown.
Rev. Todd Johnson, pastor of Second Baptist Church in Warren and a city council member, worries that his mostly African American parishioners will not benefit from the new jobs.
Mr. Johnson, whose parents worked for GM, encourages youths to study subjects such as robotics and coding, and has led after-church trips to a science and technology center in nearby Youngstown .
,Opportunities keep coming,” he said, “and I don’t want to see the next generation of my children miss out.”
An important question is what will happen to those whose skills are no longer needed.
GM is tackling that issue at its Toledo factory, Toledo Propulsion Systems, which makes transmissions that electric cars won’t need. The automaker has committed to investing $760 million in retraining Toledo workers and converting assembly lines at the plant to make electric motors.
If anything, GM will need more workers as it replaces gasoline models with electric cars, said Eric Gonzales, the factory’s executive director. “We’re taking the staff with us.”
The GM factory in Toledo will show whether established automakers can compete with Tesla, the fast-growing automaker that can focus all its resources on electric vehicles because of all it makes. Established car makers need to keep making money off internal combustion vehicles while developing a new technology that isn’t yet profitable.
GM has an advantage, Mr. Gonzales said, because it has factories equipped with sprinkler systems, high-voltage power and other essentials. “We already have four walls with infrastructure,” he said, speaking above the noise of clanking machinery. “Someone new, they have very expensive capital costs.”
Other auto executives prefer to start fresh. Volkswagen’s new Scout Motors unit looked at sites in Ohio and other states to produce electric pickup trucks and SUVs, but decided to build a $2 billion factory in South Carolina.
It’s cheaper and easier to build from scratch, said Scott Keogh, Scout’s chief executive. “You’re not dodging this classic dynamic of a legacy internal combustion engine plant where you need to inject a new electric vehicle,” he said.
Ohio is in intense competition with other states to attract investment. But Midwestern states, including Michigan, Indiana and Illinois, have been less successful than states in the South where Republican political leaders have invested aggressively — even as they denounce Democratic policies that helped create the boom.
Since 2020, automakers have announced investments of $51 billion in electric vehicle and battery production in the South, compared to $31 billion in Great Lakes region states, according to the Center for Automotive Research.
Southern states tend to have lower labor costs, partly because most auto plants there are not unionized. That could pose a problem for the United Auto Workers and President Biden, who wants the switch to electric vehicles to create more high-paying union jobs. It may well be that most new electric car and battery jobs will end up in the South, where unions face political opposition, and not in the Midwest, where unions have political influence – and where most jobs will be created. Combustion engines are lost in vehicles once were.
Ohio has a few things going for it. In March, Honda Motor said it would convert one of two assembly lines at its decades-old plant in Marysville, near Columbus, to manufacture electric vehicles. Honda, a Japanese company, is also building a battery factory with LG Energy Solutions in Jeffersonville, about an hour away.
In Ohio, Honda employs more than 14,000 people making cars and motors, and the company’s plan will reveal whether electric vehicles, which require fewer parts than gasoline cars, will create or destroy jobs.
For the next several years, the transition will likely create jobs as carmakers make both gasoline and electric vehicles. Bob Nelson, executive vice president of American Honda Motor, said there was a shortage of skilled labor at the time. “We need everybody,” he said in Marysville, where Honda makes the Accord sedan.
What will happen afterwards is less certain. “When you don’t have the complexity you used to have with engines and transmissions and mufflers and radiators and exhaust systems and all those components, they’re not going to be there anymore,” said Bruce Baumhower, president of a United Auto Workers “It amazes me what’s left,” said the local that represents workers at auto suppliers in Ohio.
Dana Incorporated, based in Maumee near Toledo, is also grappling with that question. Dana’s employees — more than 40,000 of them — make axles, drive shafts and other parts. Electric vehicles require axles but generally do not require long drive shafts because the motors can be placed close to the wheels.
Dana CEO James Kamsikas has spent time in China and been impressed by the proliferation of electric vehicles there. Recognizing the threat to some of Dana’s products, Mr. Kamsikas acquired several firms specializing in electric motors and other technology.
Dana now offers axles with built-in electric motors, saving weight and energy, and it has deployed its expertise in gaskets to make equipment for cooling electric-car batteries that GM plans to use. planning. Most of Dana’s orders are for products related to electric vehicles.
Ohio’s economic future depends on whether other companies make similar leaps. “You don’t have a choice,” said Mr. Kamsikas. “Sooner or later, you will be a melting iceberg.”
Source