3 ms·

Ford set to announce $3.5B EV battery plant in Marshall, sources say

32 points by clouddrover 4y ago

berkle4455 4y ago
Marshall being a tiny town in southwest Michigan, USA.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  Sort of anyway. The 94 corridor is pretty highly developed, and Marshall is between Jackson and Kalamazoo, about 30-35 miles from each.
- yoshamano 4y ago
  Well, today I get to be the person who gets to express surprise that their small hometown gets posted on Hacker News. This "Mega Site" has been on the table now for almost 15 years. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-alabama-idUSL0544222520080705 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-alabama-idUSL0... If I remember correctly, the Alabama site had utilities on site ready to go and our site was three contiguous farms. Fifteen years later that's still mostly the case but there are fewer houses among the farms and various levels of government have been making actual property purchases to increase their commitment to the idea of an industrial site. It wasn't until they started clear cutting all the trees along C Drive North that local opposition assembled around a "save historic Marshall" message. Even though there's been a decade and a half to derail this project. Also, we're not just on the I-94 corridor, but we're also on the I-69 corridor. The site is also within spitting distance of a rail line (I don't remember if its the CN Grand Trunk line or BNSF).
dang 4y ago
This appears to be an announcement of an announcement. We should probably wait for the announcement. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20announcement%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22no%20harm%20in%20waiting%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  Just wanted to congratulate you again about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34706153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34706153. However you did it, it deserves a post of its own someday so that people appreciate how much skill it took. It seems like you'd create a new user account, then transfer the comments and submissions from the old one to the new one, then close the old one. But it's still impressive you're able to keep Firebase, Algolia, and HN in sync while doing that atomically. Though I guess you'd need to solve that problem anyway, in order to move hundreds of comments from one thread to another. I'm not sure how you talk to Firebase and Algolia from Arc -- I used curl, and issuing thousands of curl requests tended to take awhile to complete. https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/master/algolia.arc#L21-L24 https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/master/algolia.arc#... Hopefully some of the Arc enhancements can be released someday. But in the meantime, thanks for implementing features that you really didn't need to implement. Users would've survived if they couldn't change their names, but now they can, and that's pretty special. Have a good evening.
mouse_ 4y ago
So, how about them Lithium futures?
photochemsyn 4y ago
> "Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin said last month that he removed his state from consideration for the factory — Michigan's only publicly known competitor for the plant — because it would serve as a "Trojan horse" for China into the U.S., helping the Far East bolster its EV battery dominance and spread its influence." This is a rather odd view, considering how China's rise to dominance in the manufacturing sector depended so much on corporations coming to China to build factories there. Couldn't it also be that if Chinese corporations that want to sell goods in the USA have to set up factories in the USA, this will aid in the re-industrialization of the United States?
- Gibbon1 4y ago
  > corporations coming to China to build factories there There is a slight of hand going on there. Corporations bankrolled Chinese businessmen and their silent Communist party partners to build factories in China. Which they then outsourced production to.
- tooltalk 4y ago
  This is actually fairly consistent with China's protectionist domestic industry model. When foreign EV battery makers entered China back in 2015, China's domestic EV manufacturing was still tiny. LG Chem from South Korea was among the first to open EV battery plant in Nanjing, China in the late 2015, and China quickly greeted them with a change in EV/EV battery subsidy policies that excluded foreign competitors and in some cases, China refused to grant license to do business there; all in the name of protecting their EV battery younglings. And it seems to have worked: CATL and BYD from China are now among the biggest producers of EV batteries today. I'm not sure if Ford/CATL's new plant is necessarily going to "revitalize/re-industrialize" American manufacturing, but my fear is that China has no compunction about weaponizing their dominant market position or trade to settle geopolitical disputes (eg, rare earth metal export restriction against Japan in 2010).
projectramo 4y ago
What’s their source of lithium? Can’t read the article.
throwaway69123 4y ago
The big question is can Ford survive the cost of transition to EV, they already have a high debt load under ICE.

32 points by clouddrover 4y ago

berkle4455 4y ago

Marshall being a tiny town in southwest Michigan, USA.

maxerickson 4y ago
Sort of anyway. The 94 corridor is pretty highly developed, and Marshall is between Jackson and Kalamazoo, about 30-35 miles from each.
yoshamano 4y ago
Well, today I get to be the person who gets to express surprise that their small hometown gets posted on Hacker News. This "Mega Site" has been on the table now for almost 15 years. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-alabama-idUSL0544222520080705 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-alabama-idUSL0... If I remember correctly, the Alabama site had utilities on site ready to go and our site was three contiguous farms. Fifteen years later that's still mostly the case but there are fewer houses among the farms and various levels of government have been making actual property purchases to increase their commitment to the idea of an industrial site. It wasn't until they started clear cutting all the trees along C Drive North that local opposition assembled around a "save historic Marshall" message. Even though there's been a decade and a half to derail this project. Also, we're not just on the I-94 corridor, but we're also on the I-69 corridor. The site is also within spitting distance of a rail line (I don't remember if its the CN Grand Trunk line or BNSF).

dang 4y ago

This appears to be an announcement of an announcement. We should probably wait for the announcement. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20announcement%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22no%20harm%20in%20waiting%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

sillysaurusx 4y ago
Just wanted to congratulate you again about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34706153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34706153. However you did it, it deserves a post of its own someday so that people appreciate how much skill it took. It seems like you'd create a new user account, then transfer the comments and submissions from the old one to the new one, then close the old one. But it's still impressive you're able to keep Firebase, Algolia, and HN in sync while doing that atomically. Though I guess you'd need to solve that problem anyway, in order to move hundreds of comments from one thread to another. I'm not sure how you talk to Firebase and Algolia from Arc -- I used curl, and issuing thousands of curl requests tended to take awhile to complete. https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/master/algolia.arc#L21-L24 https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/master/algolia.arc#... Hopefully some of the Arc enhancements can be released someday. But in the meantime, thanks for implementing features that you really didn't need to implement. Users would've survived if they couldn't change their names, but now they can, and that's pretty special. Have a good evening.

mouse_ 4y ago

So, how about them Lithium futures?

photochemsyn 4y ago

> "Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin said last month that he removed his state from consideration for the factory — Michigan's only publicly known competitor for the plant — because it would serve as a "Trojan horse" for China into the U.S., helping the Far East bolster its EV battery dominance and spread its influence." This is a rather odd view, considering how China's rise to dominance in the manufacturing sector depended so much on corporations coming to China to build factories there. Couldn't it also be that if Chinese corporations that want to sell goods in the USA have to set up factories in the USA, this will aid in the re-industrialization of the United States?

Gibbon1 4y ago
> corporations coming to China to build factories there There is a slight of hand going on there. Corporations bankrolled Chinese businessmen and their silent Communist party partners to build factories in China. Which they then outsourced production to.
tooltalk 4y ago
This is actually fairly consistent with China's protectionist domestic industry model. When foreign EV battery makers entered China back in 2015, China's domestic EV manufacturing was still tiny. LG Chem from South Korea was among the first to open EV battery plant in Nanjing, China in the late 2015, and China quickly greeted them with a change in EV/EV battery subsidy policies that excluded foreign competitors and in some cases, China refused to grant license to do business there; all in the name of protecting their EV battery younglings. And it seems to have worked: CATL and BYD from China are now among the biggest producers of EV batteries today. I'm not sure if Ford/CATL's new plant is necessarily going to "revitalize/re-industrialize" American manufacturing, but my fear is that China has no compunction about weaponizing their dominant market position or trade to settle geopolitical disputes (eg, rare earth metal export restriction against Japan in 2010).

projectramo 4y ago

What’s their source of lithium? Can’t read the article.

throwaway69123 4y ago

The big question is can Ford survive the cost of transition to EV, they already have a high debt load under ICE.