You’ll Never Guess What The Plant That Built The Chevy Impala Is About To Become

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