Build1 publisher2 min readPublished
GM and LG idled 1,330 Lordstown battery jobs in the months after the EV credit repeal
Removing a per-car subsidy left a finished battery plant in Ohio making cells nobody was buying, and the fastest cost its owners could cut was people. The capital had been committed years before the policy changed.
The Engineer · Build desk
What happened
- General Motors and LG Energy Solution's joint venture in Lordstown, Ohio said last autumn that low demand for electric vehicles would stop work at its battery plant in January.
- The shutdown notice landed several weeks after Trump and Republicans in Congress repealed the $7,500 tax credit for EV buyers, and US electric vehicle sales fell sharply once it was gone.
- Reuters found three of the plant's workers on folding chairs in the Lordstown United Auto Workers hall on a Friday in May, out of work for the whole year.
- Ford chief executive Jim Farley said the collapse in sales after the credit lapsed in September 2025 was the main reason Ford wrote off a significant part of its EV investment.
Compiled by The EngineerSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- cost Payroll is the only cost that can be cut quickly, and at roughly $1.73 million of plant per idled worker the capital bill keeps running whoever is sent home.
- exposure About 87 percent of announced EV investment went to states Trump won in 2024, per Atlas Public Policy, so the plants exposed to the repeal sit in the districts that elected the administration that repealed it.
- contradiction The White House calls the subsidised demand "artificial" while Ford's chief executive names the credit's expiry as the main reason for his write-off, so the record disagrees with itself about whether those sales were ever real.
- constraint The design had two halves, China trade restrictions and federal subsidies; with the buyer credit gone, domestic cell plants keep the cost-side protection without the demand that was meant to fill them.
The credit attached to the buyer, not to the plant. A $7,500 rebate changes the price a customer sees at the dealership [4]. It changes nothing about the fixed cost of a cell line. The Lordstown line cost $2.3 billion, about an hour's drive from Cleveland, and that money was spent before the first cell shipped [6]. Idle equipment still depreciates.
So when the orders slow, headcount is the only cost a joint venture can cut in a week. The venture, called Altium Cells in the report, cut it: about 480 workers laid off with no end date, and 850 more told they would not be needed for several months [3]. That is 1,330 people off the line [19].
Steve Bayer, one of the men in the union hall, called the layoffs a painful disappointment after the optimism when the plant opened four years earlier [9]. He said the plant is important to very many people and that the situation is devastating, in the account as translated by mezha.net [8].
The same account records a second cause. Investment in EVs had already begun slowing before the administration changed, because Americans were buying EVs more slowly than automakers had forecast, and some buyers were deterred by high prices and worries about range [15]. The report does not quantify how much of the sales drop came from the repeal and how much from price and range resistance. Lordstown itself went up during the 2019 to 2024 run of US auto plant construction, the largest in several generations, spanning Trump's first term and Joe Biden's administration [10].
Analysis of Atlas Public Policy data has cancellations of EV and battery projects threatening or destroying tens of thousands of jobs [12]. The concentration of that investment between Georgia and Indiana earned the region the informal name Battery Belt [14]. White House spokesman Kush Desai said Trump is cutting red tape, renegotiating trade deals and lowering taxes to attract trillions of dollars in new manufacturing investment, including billions from American and foreign automakers, and he described those figures as commitments announced by companies and countries [18].
What to watch
- Whether the 850 workers told to wait several months get recall dates, or slide into the indefinite status of the other 480.