|
?:abstract
|
-
In April of 1966, a shiny white Chevrolet Impala became the first car off the assembly line of a new General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio It was the glorious start of what became a checkered history for the area This blue-collar town survived an infamous labor strike in 1972, the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of GM in 2009, and a string of unmemorable small cars—including the Chevy Vega and Cavalier—before emerging as a symbol of industrial rebirth with the production of the Chevy Cruze in 2010 □ But things soon went to hell again, and GM shuttered the plant in 2019 Even then, the pain wasn\'t over The plant became a political football for President Trump, who urged local residents not to sell their homes, because of jobs he promised to restore He later rebuked GM for not building COVID-19 ventilators in a factory it no longer owned (By that time, GM had sold the mothballed plant to Lordstown Motors Corp , a long-shot electric-truck startup ) □ Now, nine-lives Lordstown is getting another chance to play a significant role in the automotive future Whether it succeeds hinges on the biggest multibillion-dollar question in the global auto industry: Can GM, or any legacy automaker for that matter, transform itself into a true rival to Tesla, whose electric cars—and sky-high stock price—dominate the EV space? To do that, it\'ll need better, stronger, more-affordable batteries That\'s where GM\'s Ultium project comes in
|
![[This page as RDF]](https://research.tib.eu/covid-19/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}