3,000 Miles Across America, and the Jobs at Stake

When Mike Murphy drove an electric vehicle from New Hampshire to Los Angeles this summer, the charging network barely came up. That freed him to look at something harder: what America is actually building, and who is doing the building.

In South Buffalo, the Bethlehem Lackawanna steel works has sat closed since the 1980s, still throwing a shadow across the neighborhood. A mile down the highway, a new Ford stamping plant is running. Two buildings, one dead and one being born.

In Marysville, Ohio, Honda committed more than a billion dollars in 2022 to retool three plants into what it called the Ohio EV Hub, with gas, hybrid, and electric vehicles designed to come down the same line so that no EV line could become a stranded asset. In March, facing tariffs and the loss of the federal purchase credit, Honda canceled it. Marysville is the first Honda plant built outside Japan, open since 1982, and today Honda builds more cars in the United States than it builds in Japan.

In Jeffersonville, Ohio, the Honda-LG battery plant is going up anyway: roughly $4.4 billion, about two thousand jobs, twenty-four football fields of floor space. With Honda pulling back, some of that capacity is being redirected toward grid storage.

Charging infrastructure is a jobs story too. The fast chargers Mike used outside Buffalo were built by Autel in Greensboro, North Carolina, in a 200,000-square-foot plant with a plan for 400 jobs.

Last year American companies announced roughly $22 billion in canceled EV and battery manufacturing projects against about $17 billion in new ones. For the first time, we are unbuilding faster than we are building.

The hard part is no longer whether you can drive an electric vehicle across America. It is whether the people who build them will be Americans.

Mike Murphy’s full account of the trip is on his Substack. The Great EV Journey was produced by EVs for All America, where you can watch all 28 videos day by day.

The American EV Jobs Alliance advocates for the American workers and communities whose jobs depend on building the next generation of vehicles here.