The Illinois EV corridor got its second act not by buying a new plant, but by fighting to save an old one. If Rivian’s arrival in Normal was the corridor’s opening chapter, Belvidere is the messier, more political sequel, and in some ways the more important one.
Belvidere goes dark, then comes back
Stellantis idled its assembly plant in Belvidere in early 2023, putting well over a thousand people out of work and leaving a 60-year-old factory town wondering if it had a future. What brought it back was leverage. According to Site Selection magazine, the UAW made reopening Belvidere a centerpiece of its 2023 contract fight, the Biden administration applied political pressure, and the Department of Energy put up a $334 million grant to help convert the plant to electric-vehicle production, with a battery facility part of the plan.
It has not been a clean story since. The same reporting notes that former Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares resigned in December 2024, with a new North American chief stepping in and emphasizing the company’s commitment to working with the UAW. Reopening timelines have slipped and been argued over. This is what it actually looks like to drag a legacy plant into the EV era: contentious, slow, and political in a way that buying an empty Mitsubishi factory never was.
The rest of the corridor
Belvidere does not stand alone. According to Crain’s Chicago Business, Lion Electric chose Joliet to build electric buses and trucks, giving the I-55 spine a second EV producer, though that bet has since shown how much risk these young manufacturers carry. And the research backbone matters as much as the assembly lines: Argonne National Laboratory, in suburban Lemont, is one of the country’s central battery-technology research centers, which is exactly the kind of asset that makes an automaker take a region seriously.
Why I keep watching this
From an investment-attraction angle, Belvidere is the more instructive case than Normal. Winning a greenfield plant is mostly about incentives and a clean site. Saving an existing one means untangling labor, federal money, a global parent company’s strategy, and a town’s identity all at once. It is the same build-it-here instinct that runs through Chicago’s industrial AI scene and its broader enterprise tech base, just with a lot more steel and a lot more politics.
I am rooting for Belvidere, with clear eyes. A $334 million federal grant and a union contract are real commitments, but they are not the same as trucks rolling off the line. The EV corridor’s first act proved Illinois could attract the new. The second act will prove whether it can convert the old, and that is the harder, more valuable trick.