If a cat has nine lives, the Lordstown Assembly in Ohio has the endurance of 100 cats. What was once a plant at the center of American manufacturing has continued to change hands without ever fully going away, including to a troubled EV startup and a Taiwanese company that wanted to build electric crossovers for startups like Fisker. Will the plant get back to its carmaking ways? It doesn’t seem like it, though the facility will continue to live on in an unexpected form.
And speaking of unexpected, the loss of the IRA tax credit means Chinese LFP batteries are somehow economically viable again, even with the existing tariffs. While this may only be a short-to-medium-term outcome, the unintended consequences of revoking the IRA remain fascinating.
Roger Penske’s operations have a reputation for being run at the highest levels of efficiency, and no non-OEM motorsports organization in history can quite claim the success Penske has achieved. That being said, Penske’s IndyCar operation keeps finding new and novel ways to look terrible.
It’s Friday, and I like to end The Morning Dump on Fridays on a high note. This week? There’s an official way to sell your Singer on the secondary market. I’m guessing at least 1-in-4 of you own a Singer, so this will make many of you quite pleased.
Lordstown Will Live On As… An AI Data Center And Data Center Equipment Production Facility?
I drive by the Lordstown facility in Northeast Ohio every year, and it’s had three different names on it in the last six trips. For its first half-century, the more than 6 million square foot facility was home to a number of important GM cars, from the mid-’60s Chevy Impala, through the ’90s Cavalier and Sunfire, and finally the Chevy Cruze.
When GM stopped production there in 2017, the whole thing was sold to EV truck startup Lordstown Motors. That did not end well, and out of bankruptcy, the plant was sold to Taiwanese mega-manufacturer Foxconn. The plan for Foxconn was to build EVs on a contract basis for various brands, including Fisker at one point, but that never happened.
Now? According to Bloomberg, Foxconn has sold the operation to the Japanese AI data center project called Stargate:
SoftBank, which has struggled to create a financial blueprint for Stargate, had approached Foxconn to get the Apple Inc. supplier on board with its plan to build data centers and related infrastructure throughout the US, people familiar with the matter said. The EV plant sale is a result of those efforts by the Japanese investor, they said, asking not to be named as the discussions remain private.
Earlier this week, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the flagship unit of Foxconn, said it had agreed to sell the EV plant to Crescent Dune LLC for $375 million without identifying the company behind the entity. SoftBank is Foxconn’s counterparty in the transaction, the people said.
A representative for SoftBank declined to comment. Foxconn did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Participation by Hon Hai — an investor in SoftBank’s first Vision Fund — would be a boon for SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son’s grandiose plans to be at the center of surging investment in AI-supporting hardware.
The facility is huge, so there’s plenty of space. Questions abound, of course. Will it be used as a data center as well, and not just a place that builds equipment for data centers? Is this a way for the Japanese government to count investment in the United States as part of its tariff deal? Will this create a lot more jobs, or just a few?
[Ed Note: You may have scene the news about Tucson cheering when its City Counsel voted unanymously to block Amazon’s plans to build a data center. Seems these things are popping up everywhere, and they all have “Project” names, with Amazon’s being Project Blue. -DT]
The Wild Economics That Make The Importation Of Chinese Batteries Logical Again
The big question I had when GM announced that it was bringing back the Bolt was: What kinda battery is going to be in there? The most sensible battery for a small platform like the Bolt is likely one based on LFP chemistry (lithium iron phosphate), but there is no Ultium LFP to speak of and the timeline for GM and its partner LG to start making one doesn’t match up with the timeline for the car.
In a world where the $7,500 tax credit existed, importing a battery from China doesn’t make sense, right? As a manufacturer, you’d be paying a huge tariff (probably 80%) that would offset the potential savings, and then you’d no longer qualify for that $7,500 incentive. The tax credit is going away, though, and now there’s a reason why it might work in the short term.
Automakers believe, and are probably correct, that for domestically produced and affordable electric cars, the best choice is prismatic LFPs. Thanks to a long-term disinterest and lack of investment in battery technology (at least relative to China’s huge investments), China became the only country with the ability to produce LFP batteries at scale. This is why anyone in the West using LFP batteries was most likely using a pack from CATL or BYD. Both Ford and Tesla used these batteries, and the Mach-E with standard range still has a CATL LFP pack.
Now we have an answer to our Bolt conundrum, according to The Wall Street Journal:
General Motors plans to import batteries from China, despite steep tariffs imposed by President Trump, to power its second-generation Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle, a supply-chain Band-Aid for a company that touts extensive investments in U.S. battery manufacturing.
GM will buy the batteries from China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology, one of the world’s largest battery makers, for about two years until the Detroit automaker and its Korean partner LG Energy Solution can stand up their own manufacturing of the lower-cost batteries in the U.S., according to people familiar with the plan.
The new Bolt is set to start rolling off the line at the company’s Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas late this year, reaching dealerships in 2026 as GM’s most affordable electric vehicle.
How the math works out in this is a little less clear to me, and there’s a lot of nuance, which is why I texted our pal Sam Abuelsamid, who knows all these things:
My guess is they are planning to implement a structural battery pack with no modules. CATL makes prismatic LFP cells that are widely used for this kind of application. Between the savings from LFP chemistry, plus the significant pack cost savings of getting rid of modules, I’m guessing more than a 50% cut in finished pack cost compared to the previous generation.
Add in savings from using a range of other Ultium components that have much more scale than the bespoke Bolt stuff from before and even with the tariffs, the economics might work out favorably for GM to sell at a similar price to before.
The cell-to-pack architecture also overcomes the lower energy density of the LFP relative to NMC that they used before. With the NMC and modules, the fill ratio of the pack is somewhere around 35% of the pack volume is active cell material storing energy. get rid of the modules and that gets to somewhere between 70 and 80% so you can actually have more overall capacity or make the pack smaller and lighter with the same 65-kWh as before.
That makes sense to me. In the interim, you can import a battery that’s going to make the Bolt way more energy dense, using the same rough space as the old 65-kWh battery. Given that the Trump Administration hasn’t gotten rid of the IRA’s 45x incentives for manufacturing battery plants yet, the cost of producing packs locally will make the economics even better.
Obviously, I don’t think that Republicans wanted to make Chinese batteries more attractive with the latest bill, but that’s essentially what happened. Ford will open a plant soon in Marshall, Michigan, which uses CATL technology to build LFP batteries.
It’s possible that Republican legislators will work to gut 45x or make it difficult to use Chinese technology to build batteries, which would be counterproductive. This is American-developed technology in the first place, and the West has stood by while China has stolen its IP. At this point, Chinese companies have gotten further ahead in battery development, and it would be a waste of time and money not to take advantage of that expertise to catch up a little.
Penske Distances Itself From ICE Tweet
The Speedway Slammer ???? pic.twitter.com/fXlTgWW8jA
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) August 5, 2025
Because it’s 2025, I had to make sure that the IndyCar with the word “ICE” all over it was not, in fact, real.
It’s not. This is just a photoshop job from the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that is, uh, celebrating the creation of a new detention center at the Miami Correctional Facility in Bunker Hill, Indiana, which is more than an hour away from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
The implication is that there would be a facility to house immigrants somewhere just outside the hallowed ground of IMS. Not to get political, I guess, but this is gross. Not the least because the person making this had to know that the #5 car is driven by Pato O’Ward, who is from Mexico. Here’s what he told the AP:
“It caught a lot of people off guard. Definitely caught me off guard,” O’Ward said Wednesday. “I was just a little bit shocked at the coincidences of that and, you know, of what it means. … I don’t think it made a lot of people proud, to say the least.”
I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
The company did send a note to Automotive News saying it wasn’t aware this was happening and would prefer not to be included in posts like this:
“We were unaware of plans to incorporate our imagery as part of yesterday’s announcement,” IndyCar said in an emailed statement to Automotive News. “Consistent with our approach to public policy and political issues, we are communicating our preference that our [intellectual property] not be utilized moving forward in relation to this matter.”
Fox Corp. bought a one-third stake in IndyCar, along with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, from Penske Entertainment on July 31. Fox Sports acquired media rights to IndyCar races before the 2025 season.
Roger Penske is an old friend of President Trump and a supporter of the administration, which makes this a little awkward.
Singer Would Like You To Sell Your Porsche 911s Reimagined By Singer Via RM Sotheby’s
The multi-million dollar Singer restomods, or whatever you want to call them, are starting to trade hands and, in doing so, give us a glimpse into how much these spectacular cars actually cost. Perhaps Singer doesn’t want its cars on the open secondary market? It’s been rumored that many high-end brands with small numbers of cars have tried to broker sales internally, often by buying back the cars before selling to someone else.
Instead of hassling with all that, Singer has tapped RM Sotheby’s to handle the sales. Per a press release:
RM Sotheby’s experience and global reach will support existing owners who are looking to sell their car by matching them with drivers looking to buy a previously restored Porsche 911 Reimagined by Singer.
Harvey Stanley, Head of Private Sales UK at RM Sotheby’s explains:
“RM Sotheby’s has always had a deep understanding of what makes a Porsche 911 Reimagined by Singer so special, and in recent years our team has earned the trust not only of owners, but of the company itself. Using our platform will ensure a simple and stress-free means of selling for current owners, while those looking to join the Singer family by buying a previously restored car will enjoy benefits ranging from goodwill warranty to aftersales care and the ability to further personalize their car.”
Again, I assume many of you are in the market, so here you go.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
Why, in Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” video, does he have a Chinese-language newspaper?
The Big Question
Any end-of-summer road trips planned? Where are you going?
Top photo: Michael Schwartz Library, Cleveland State University,
Youngstown-Warren Collection
I hope young Master Tracy-(not his real name) was being watched by his mother while David desperately tried to recapture his youth by huffing the heady mix of rust particles and elderly brake fluid that led to this post.
My latest concern is if the subsidies for buying health insurance will expire at the end of 2025. I never thought this would concern me, but also, it seems to be.
In the same vain as the previous statement, I may be road tripping to a small town in the center of NY to look for an apartment. I may have to make some very tough automotive decisions in the next month or two that I was not prepared to make. It may be the end of an era for me, and hopefully the start of a new one.
Takin the Box from Portland (OR) to Tucson in a few weeks. Haven’t decided if I should take the easy route (down CA and turn left) or the desolate route through NV and a little of UT…
So you’re saying I can’t just trade my Singer in at the local Ford dealership for like 1000 Mustangs?
Or three Mustangs Reimagined by Multimatic (i.e., the GTD).
Interesting. It seems like the vast majority of data centers on the East Coast are in Northern Virginia (this is good for my electrician nephew, as he’ll have plenty of work for literally the rest of his life). Since it appears the Lordstown plant is cursed, might as well repurpose it for something useful.
The only road trip I’d like to do right now is pack all of our shit and leave NJ and never look back.
Can recommend the one way out of NJ trip, truly the experience of a lifetime.
I’ve long joked that so many people move from NJ to VT because they were headed north and by the time they could make a U turn, they were already in Fair Haven just over the NY line.
The people in the southbound lane end up in the Carolinas.
I’d love to return to NC. Here’s hoping…
I knew GM was going to do something like this. When the tax credit became available, the rule was that the percentage of battery components to be made in the NA region was going to increase over time. At the beginning of 2024, some Ultium vehicles became not elegible because some components came from China. GM quickly fixed it sourcing components locally.
I guess all new 2026 are going to have a lot of components made in China if they are still cheap enough after tariffs. TACO tuesday
This is what I and many others have been criticizing the administrations trade “plans” so heavily for. Saying (or shouting) about how this is great for America and terrible for *insert group* but the policies are so horrendously shortsighted and lack economics to stand on that they effectively do the opposite. While people can form their own opinions on what trade goals have merit, to say the current administration has been achieving their trade goals is objectively untrue. The data and proof supports that they policies set in place are having the opposite effect of their stated goal, and that’s just plain bad leadership.
It’s absolutely terrible leadership, but whether it achieves the publicly stated goals is a distraction. This tariff policy is doing exactly what it’s designed to do, which is generate chaos and incentivize business leaders and foreign governments to come straight to Trump for favors. It’s a very effective way of more deeply entrenching the oligarchy.
So, none of the New Big 3 (Tesla, Rivian, Lucid) wanted the Lordstown facility…
The AI data center will be a huge strain on resources there, given how much power and water they use.
Butlerian Jihad now!
Maybe they will make all the components to mine crapto, then can the workers. Then just mine it until there are no longer resources and see what your “air” currency will buy you.
Whenever I read about the *hand to forehead* difficulties of owning/selling/whatevering a seven-figure car, I really want to go find a guillotine. If you can afford to have one of those, you do not have problems, you have manageable expenses. Get stuffed, and stop hogging all the good stuff.
Planned trips. oh ye. Two traction engines a BSA A10 whith a chair, a mahoosive truck and two, yes two Lagondas, a standard 10 van and some other stuff. YesI know it only 70 miles, but it has been years in the planning!
The most infamous Lordstown product was the Vega.
I’m considering running up to Chicago next month to catch the Klairmont Kollections. We took nice trips to Richmond, Baltimore and Ocean City area this summer.
I remember touring Lordstown in the late 60s. They were building BOF full size Chevys and partial framed Pontiac Firebirds on the same line. Next came the Vega (theoretically at 100 per hour).
End of summer road trip this year will be to Kenosha, thanks to “The Last Independent Automaker”, and the Illinois Railway Museum, thanks to Mercedes Streeter! And maybe a stop in Auburn, IN to see the Duesenberg/Cord/Auburn museum as well.
No summer road trips (summer is a horrible time to travel with the heat and children out of school).
We are planning a 16 day campervan trip to Craters of the Moon National Park and Tetons NP in mid September. The week of Thanksgiving we are doing a 8 day fly and ride motorcycle trip in southern Arizona. (The week of Thanksgiving is a great time to vacation)
Sorry but no. China bought the world leading LFP technology developed by a MIT spin-off with billions of US federal government investment fair and square at a bankruptcy auction for pennies on the dollar. ($257 million)
LOL, I really did not want to get into the A123 of it all…
So instead you said that China stole tech that we were stupid enough to sell them far and square?
Facts matter.
In today’s day and age, eh, not so much.
Somehow some people’s “alternative facts” (thank you Kellyanne Conway) are more correct than objective reality.
Watertown, Ma Arsenal complex circa 2006.
Just got back from a New Mexico to Michigan and back trip, long days, HOT AF in the midwest (Missouri? More like Misery), idk how y’all deal with that.
Just got back from NY/Mass/New England area, which was a lot of hours in the car but a fun trip for the kids before school starts back up.
My neck of the woods. I hope you enjoyed your time here!
Thanks, we did.
Too short of a trip to see even a fraction of what’s there, but we hit some highlights and will return another time for sure.
Good! Yeah, each state could be a full vacation, never mind trying to hit them all.
I’ll be road tripping to Oblivion, an 80s and 90s themed Car & Culture show.
Apparently, last year I was parked down the row from Hundal and his Porsche, and never noticed.
This is year two and it’s a great trip through cottage country, where we stop over at a friend’s cottage a couple hours from the venue.
This year my friend with his w123 will be joining the Slammed Sacco w126 and the XR4Ti. A couple of Saab 900s are joining us for the drive, but staying elsewhere closer to the venue.
Oh man, my 03 Civic is still dormant due to a dead battery, and that’s almost as far as Toronto for me; if I had known sooner I might have planned to drag my kids out there.
Next year!
I was going to guess it was a new detention facility for ICE, so this is actually refreshing.
Daughter already started school yesterday, but we squeezed in a 6-day Kentucky/Tennessee roadtrip at the very last minute. This also coincided with the first sub-90-degree weather I’ve seen all summer, which was amazing. We hit amusement parks, museums, multiple huge caves, tubing in the Smokies, tons of backroads, Oak Ridge nuclear laboratories, and all kinds of fun stuff like that. Lots of diversity, and relatively low crowds because so many people were home getting ready for school to start (note: the majority of car tags were from Illinois, Iowa, and other places where school tends to start a little later)
I might have to turn in my Enthusiast Card, but I went to Bowling Green for 2 days and didn’t go to the Corvette museum. We just had too many conflicts, maybe next time.
Addendum: I forgot how taxing it is to drive over 1,000 miles in 5 days when more than half of that driving is on 2-lane roads. Interstates are like a cheat code!
Addendum the second: We also did an overnighter to see Weird Al the week before, and it was 100% worth it. There’s no other musician I’ve listened to so consistently for almost my entire life. It’s surreal.
Love weird Al!!! planned our whole summer vacation to Colorado around his show at red rocks!!
The Lordstown plant site will exist forever, constantly shuffled between companies promising to build the latest buzzword product and create local jobs to extract maximum government subsidies before “market conditions” causes the project to be abandoned. Rinse and repeat every handful of years.
Until it’s finally old and considered industrially charming enough to become a food hall. The Shops at Vega Square.
Hon Hai isnt a unit of Foxconn, it is Foxconn, the legal name of the company is Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, they just use Foxconn as a d/b/a brand name in most foreign markets
“the West has stood by while China has stolen its IP”
Not sure you can really call this one “stealing”, sounds more like “the West, chasing short term profits, gave up after a couple of years and sold the IP to China for bankruptcy prices” –https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A123_Systems
My stepdad knew the CEO of A123 and worked with him on some projects. They had trouble drumming up the demand for LiFe batteries in the early days. Most potential customers didn’t want to give up the energy density of Li-ion for the additional safety of LiFe. A123 was a classic case of the right product at the wrong time.
It just really sucks that the immediate profit, short term gains model in the US practically dooms products that are too early. It’d be nice if early innovators were invested in long term and rewarded, not effectively punished for being ahead of the curve. I suppose Tesla got that support, but seems like most others don’t.
Hank: I sell data centers and data center accessories. That’s what you want, I tell ya hwat.
Bobby: What if someone asks about the cloud?
Hank: Then we ask them politely yet firmly to leave.
No real spoilers, but we’re watching the reboot KotH and seeing Hank return from Saudi Arabia after working for Aramco in propane was a perfect plotline for a reboot.
Going to hell in hand basket. But in a figuratively sense, hopefully.
They’re not really “trips” in that they’re always day trips, and I never spend a night or really “go” anywhere. Though usually I go into central Maine, very northern New Hampshire, or through the north and northwestern ends of Vermont.
I leave at 11PM, and get home for dinner time the next day. It’s just to enjoy and find new driving roads. No one’s on them. It’s like high-intensity meditation.
I am trying to figure this out. Is there a nap planned? Or do you just get home exhausted?
New England: Basically Like One Big State™
I was talking more about the 11pm departure to return home in time for dinner. Call it 19 hours starting just before midnight.
The next time you’re in the neighborhood, check out The Republic of Indian Stream. Many of my ancestors are buried here. When I learned its rebellious existence, it explained a lot of family attributes. This was our last chance to have an Andorra-like internal Republic…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Indian_Stream
I’ll keep it in mind. I don’t go into these states to stop and visit places if I’m doing “midnight bombing runs.” I sometimes do day trips, and I’ll stop in places because there’s traffic on even b-roads, but that’s pretty rare. Apparently last one I did was fall 2024, and stopped off in Warner. I visited a telephone museum, and a bookstore/toy shop.
Most of what I’m doing is enjoying the fact that I might see one other vehicle per hour, so the remaining risk is myself or a moose. There’s no visiting anywhere, because it can take hours to get to a good road, and people start waking up around 7AMish. Only so much time.
That’s really interesting. Thank you. This would make a good History That Doesn’t Suck episode.
I’ve done this a few times, leaving early in the AM though. One time I wasn’t thinking, and the GF and I decided spur of the moment to do a day trip to NH. Since neither of us had it off, we had forgotten it was Columbus Day weekend. We hit nasty traffic on 93N starting in Lincoln, we bailed on the plan to head north and worked our way back south via backroads. It still ended up being a nice day.
Another time we drove 5 hours to VT in Feb just so the dogs could play in the snow, haha.
Young Mr. Gordy has never gotten the credit he deserves for his prescience of all the spyware secretly loaded on your electronics 40+ years after the release of his one and only charting song.
That’s a solid earworm, thanks in part to the late Mr. Jackson singing some major parts of it. I didn’t learn that until a couple months ago, now I can’t unhear it.
Side note to the road trip reply, but last weekend we stumbled upon a local amusement park called Beech Bend in Bowling Green, KY, which was surprisingly good for being relatively unknown outside of the local area.
They actually have the swinging boat ride that was purchased from Neverland. They mention it on a plaque and they play MJ’s music on the ride, but you can also tell they were trying to distance themselves from going all-in on the connection.
I really love random Americana stuff. Pound for pound, I think I’ll take it over the endless reservations and crowds of going to the major Instagram Sites around the US (and the world).
You know that Sting is singing background on “Money for Nothing,” right? Also wonder if the park has to pay royalties.