Illinois to offer Rivian extra incentives for R2 production

[Bee]

Rivian have 10 years to open the plant to get the tax package from Georgia. This is likely a two year delay so they will still easily be within the ten year timeframe.

I understand, I didn't say the fiscal civil war was over. If Rivian stays a niche brand instead of becoming a worldwide automaker of repute, is that 400,000 unit factory still going to be appealing?

Yeah but it's a lot more complicated than that. Using the movie industry as a specific example, the trend the past 10 - 20 years has been to offshore more and more movie industry work. My brother in law is a high level producer. I'm certain everyone on this forum has seen two, three, up to 10 of his films. He has explained this in detail. In the past 15 years he has spent months at a time overseas filming and in post-production. A whole series of his films had all the post-production done in London because it was cheaper and they had some seriously skilled people in the CGI arena. Other countries are providing incentives to get that business OUT of the US. Kudos to Georgia for creating incentives to bring the work back/keep the work HERE IN THE US.

Ah-hah! Now we're talking where my hands on experience lay. I've spent the past 24 years in production and just had a business crater off of the duo-strikes and lost business (us vendors don't really get considered in these things, imagine holding an entire fleet with pending rentals for productions at premium rates, all new, and that going away and having to rely on Turo, all while the EV market is taking a downturn holding only EVs... not great).

My sob digression aside, I live in NYC and I've seen this manifest in crazy ways throughout my life and career. I saw Canada take the business from NYC, NYC take the business from California and Canada and now Georgia trying to siphon off the entire world. And that's simplifying it so much to be almost meaningless!

You'll note everything I just listed is in North America, funny. I see people like your brother-in-law and I'd wager he's working on episodic television or film. At this very moment, from my personal experience (more commercials and broadcast television) I would never in a million years look to move production internationally. The countries that do it well like England are far more expensive and the countries that are a bargain I fly as much staff as possible in because you can't take a chance on a Romanian winging it, as talented and hardworking as they may be.

This car fleet thing I was doing was to get out of my "executive producer" role on these kinds of productions. Stress, long hours, never see the kids, where do people think I got the money for all these cars that I lost money on? That's the thing this other guy misses. We're all driving around $100k vehicles, perhaps we have some knowledge behind that and didn't inherit it form our pigs and cows.

Your international argument to me is ultimately an argument I like to make in my favor. We need a coordinated effort to combat international cheap labor looking to undermine us. If we're divided and fighting each other form within that only spells bad things. We're taking the authority away from the constitutionally mandated authority. I'm not just throwing these things around flippantly, interstate commerce is one of the first things we established as the role of the Federal Government.

Literally NY and NJ were almost going to go to blows over these fiduciary civil wars. People arguing for these subsidies are arguing against some first year, first class, first period law school known realities.

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[mikef]

I posted in another thread yesterday that on the county property map Rivian is already showing as owing a sizeable amount of land to the west of the existing factory!

I'm about an hour away from the factory so this is great news! The State of Illinois threw tons of money at Sears for way too long because it was HQ'd in one of the Chicago suburbs.

I was pumped for two reasons when RJ announced in the reveal that they were going to start R2 production in Normal. The first was I was worried they were going to hold up producing R2 until Georgia gets built which could delay that while the R1 line in the existing factory isn't running at capacity. The second is more business at the existing factory in Illinois.

Also there was an article a few months ago in the local B-N newspaper with the mayor of one of the cities saying that due to Rivian expanding they're needing to add more than 3000 new housing units in the next few years. The article was also saying workers are driving in from Peoria (30 mins) and Decatur (45 mins) and Champaign (55 mins) as well as Springfield and other cities and towns in Central Illinois.

(Decatur is also a big factory town with a lot of vacant and available industrial sites not far from the existing factory. Peoria is this way too--Caterpillar is there.)

Rivian has also leased a bunch of warehouse space across B-N.

 

[Gen(R3)Xer]

I just watched a mini documentary on this. They call them stroads (street + roads). Not only are they ugly, but they’re unfriendly and unsafe for pedestrians.

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