Inside Foxconn’s factory, once a GM plant, in Lordstown, Ohio.
Photographer: Ross Mantle for Bloomberg BusinessweekFoxconn Makes Your iPhone. Now It Wants to Make Your Electric Car
As demand for smartphones levels off, the Taiwanese electronics giant is taking a gamble on the EV business.
In what was once a humming General Motors Co. plant in northeastern Ohio, hundreds of yellow robot arms stand idle in a darkened assembly hall. Semis no longer deliver steel, parts and paint to the loading docks. The huge parking lots, where finished cars once waited to be picked up and carried onto Interstate 80 just across the street and then on to dealerships, are empty. After half a century assembling Chevrolet Impalas, Cavaliers and Cruzes, GM shuttered the Lordstown complex just outside Youngstown, near the Pennsylvania border, as part of a cost-cutting effort in 2019. It initially sold the facility to Lordstown Motors Corp., a startup that struggled for a few years to build electric trucks before filing for Chapter 11 in June.