The South cancelled $4.5bn of EV plants and kept selling more EVs anyway

Kia's assembly plant in West Point, Georgia, does not run in batches. Bodies come down the line one at a time in whatever specification a buyer ordered — different model, different colour, different trim, and, critically, a different powertrain from the car in front of it. Petrol, hybrid or electric, all on the same line. Right now the line is making a lot of hybrids.

"What we've seen is a transition back away from maybe full EV vehicle building to this kind of a middle-of-the-road opportunity," factory chief executive Stuart Countess told Grist, in reporting produced with WABE. He was unambiguous about what changed: "We had a tax incentive credit that did go away. Sales were really moving in the right direction, but once it went away, it became a much different environment."

The seventh annual Transportation Electrification in the Southeast report, published this month by Atlas Public Policy for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, puts arithmetic under that sentence. Between July 2025 and June 2026, companies cancelled or scaled back five major facilities in the region: Ford's BlueOval assembly plant in Tennessee, Enchem's electrolyte plant in Tennessee, SK On's battery plant in Georgia, Rivian's EV plant in Georgia, and VinFast's battery facility in North Carolina. Together they represent roughly $4.5 billion in withdrawn investment and about 9,670 jobs that will not now be created.

New announcements over the same twelve months totalled $3.9 billion and 1,340 jobs — down from $4.8 billion and 2,280 jobs the year before, and nowhere near enough to cover the losses. Net announced investment across the six-state region fell by $570 million, or less than one percent. Announced jobs fell by 8,330, close to 12 percent. That asymmetry is the story: the capital number barely moved, the employment number took a real hit.

What remains is still substantial. The Southeast holds a net $73.8 billion in announced EV manufacturing investment and 61,310 committed jobs across more than 120 facilities, which is 40 percent of all announced US EV manufacturing investment and 32 percent of announced jobs. Batteries and recycling account for $45.2 billion of that, EV assembly another $20.3 billion.

The report catalogues a sequence rather than a single event. Demand signals softened from late 2023. Then the consumer-facing 30D clean vehicle credit expired after September 2025. Restrictions tightened on the 45X advanced manufacturing production credit. The EPA finalised a rule in February 2026 rescinding the 2009 Endangerment Finding and repealing greenhouse gas standards for light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, then in May proposed delaying earlier emissions standards. Tariffs landed on battery packs and charger hardware. Federal fleet electrification was abandoned. Clean energy manufacturing grants were cancelled.

Manufacturers responded in the ways available to them. Some redirected underused battery capacity toward grid storage, where data-centre demand is growing faster than anyone planned for. Others shifted product mix. Hyundai's Metaplant near Savannah, built specifically to make electric vehicles, added hybrid production — the first Kia Sportage Turbo-Hybrid rolled off its line in June.

"It's kind of a messy period we're in right now," said Stephanie Valdez-Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive. "But I think the manufacturers are adjusting."

Here is where the narrative gets more complicated than the cancellation headlines suggest. Southeastern buyers did not stop buying. The region recorded nearly 225,000 new passenger EV sales in the past twelve months, up 25 percent year on year, taking cumulative sales past 1,137,000 and reaching a 7.4 percent share of new passenger vehicle sales in the second quarter of 2026. Used EV sales grew 34 percent to more than 140,800 as off-lease returns built up affordable inventory. The gap between regional and national adoption rates narrowed.

Charging kept pace too. DC fast charging accounted for more than half of all new public ports added in the last year and grew at over twice the rate of Level 2. Approved investor-owned utility spending on transportation electrification reached roughly $497 million, led by new and expanded programmes in Georgia worth nearly $58 million.

So the state that lost an SK On battery plant and a Rivian assembly plant is simultaneously the state leading regional utility investment in charging. Stan Cross, who runs SACE's electric transportation programme, put the contradiction bluntly: "When it comes to electric vehicles, Georgia politics remains utterly confused." Georgia offers no purchase incentive and charges EV owners an additional registration fee to replace lost fuel tax, while courting the companies that build them.

"The state continues to have a lot riding on the success of both the electric vehicle but also the battery market," Cross said. With policymakers largely inactive, he is looking to utility regulators instead, arguing Georgia Power should "step up and help kind of fill the void."

The damage has not all been financial. A year after federal agents detained 475 workers, most of them South Korean, at the Hyundai battery site in Ellabell, more than 300 of them have begun filing administrative claims against nine federal agencies, CNN reported this week — the first step toward a lawsuit. A search warrant obtained by CNN named four target individuals, none of them among the Korean engineers who had come to install equipment.

Valdez-Streaty's longer view is that building the cars locally eventually sells them locally. "It's like that familiarity, right? People have jobs at those companies and familiarity with those products." Whether that holds depends on there still being jobs at those companies when the market turns.