The Rivian Normal plant is the reason Illinois suddenly mattered in electric vehicles. Before it, the state’s auto story was Ford on the Far South Side and Stellantis up in Belvidere, both building gas vehicles the old way. Then a California startup bought a dead Mitsubishi factory in a downstate college town, and the map changed.

From Mitsubishi ghost town to EV anchor

Rivian took over the shuttered Mitsubishi Motors plant in Normal, a town that had branded itself “EVTown” years earlier with very little to show for it. According to Crain’s Chicago Business, Rivian began building trucks in Normal in 2021, the same stretch when Lion Electric announced it would build electric buses and trucks in Joliet. Suddenly there were two EV plants taking shape along Interstate 55, and people started using the word “hub” without irony.

The numbers got real

This was never a pilot project. According to Site Selection magazine, Rivian produced its 100,000th vehicle in Normal in April 2024, after investing more than $2 billion in the facility. For a state that ranks ninth in US auto production, planting a flag in EVs this early, before most legacy plants had converted anything, was a genuine coup. The plant is also where the mass-market push runs through, including the $45,000 Rivian R2 that pulled 100,000 pre-orders in a single day when it launched.

Why Normal, of all places

Here is the part I find interesting from where I sit. According to the state’s own economic-development materials, one factor working in Illinois’ favor was plain receptiveness. While Rivian ran into local resistance trying to build a second plant in Georgia, central Illinois rolled out the welcome mat: a ready-built factory, a willing workforce, and Argonne National Laboratory doing battery research a couple of hours up the road. That combination is exactly what you pitch when you are trying to win advanced manufacturing.

The bigger picture

Chicago’s tech base is quietly formidable, and the EV corridor is the manufacturing version of that same quiet competence. Illinois is never going to out-glamour California, but it can build the things, which is a theme that keeps repeating across the state’s industrial and tech scenes.

Normal was a smart, unglamorous win. The risk is concentration: when one young automaker carries a town’s economy, a bad quarter in California becomes a bad year in McLean County. But as an opening move, turning a dead Mitsubishi plant into a 100,000-vehicle EV anchor is the kind of thing most states only manage to put in a press release. Illinois actually did it.