Can red states overcome their hatred of California and embrace electric cars?
KOKOMO, Ind. — This industrial city an hour north of Indianapolis isn't as famous as Detroit, but it has become an unlikely battleground in the war over electric cars.
Almost everyone you meet here either works in a factory, is retired from one or has a relative in a plant that makes parts for gasoline-powered cars — which have ruled Kokomo for nearly 130 years, since a brash inventor named Elwood Haynes chugged down Pumpkinvine Pike at 7 mph in one of America's first horseless carriages.
"We haven't developed a workforce towards anything else yet," said Warren Sims, a 41-year-old worker in the same casting plant that employs his father, working on gas transmission engines. "We don't make a fuel-efficient vehicle. Everything's big and everything costs [a lot to] fuel and people buy it."
Yet change is coming. Bulldozers are clearing Kokomo's cornfields to build a $2.5-billion government-subsidized electric vehicle battery factory, with the aim of retaining jobs tied to auto production at a time California is leading the nation in phasing out gas-powered engines.
Environmentalists, along with industry and government leaders, see a transformation afoot after decades of false starts. They have acknowledged, however, that they can't complete
