One sign of the automobile industry’s changing geography is BlueOval City, a sprawling industrial campus in western Tennessee. Ford Motor Co. is spending some $5.6 billion (the largest single investment in the history of Tennessee) to build the facility on 4,100 acres about 30 miles from Memphis. When it’s up and fully running in 2027, the plant will employ some 6,000 workers and produce around half a million electric vehicles a year.

While the state of Tennessee has automobile assembly plants, including a giant Nissan plant near Nashville, BlueOval City is outside the Auto Alley footprint.

BlueOval City might be the largest new EV venture in the country, but it’s not the only one, by far. Volkswagen’s Scout Motors is building a 1,400-acre EV assembly plant in Blythewood, S.C., with the hopes of turning out its first vehicles in 2027. And while Rivian, the maker of electric-powered trucks, has suspended the construction of its $5 billion EV plant in Stanton Springs, Ga., they promise to get back to work on it when EV sales rise again.

It's not just assembly plants. Two large battery plants in Georgia, which together promise more than 10,000 jobs, are slated to open before the end of the year.

Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina: It seems on the surface that the electric vehicle industry may be coalescing around a new hub in the southeast.

But Ford’s BlueOval City, whatever its potential, is an enormous, flashy, press-worthy anomaly. Aside from the Fords, Volkswagens, and Rivians of the industry, most of the companies putting billions into EV production are doing it in longstanding assembly plants that once produced—or still produce—vehicles with internal combustion engines. For instance, GM has invested $2.2 billion to turn its Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant into its first EV-only assembly plant—and calling it Factory ZERO. The plant produced its first electric Hummer in 2022, and the company maintains a moving goalpost of eventually producing roughly 250,000 vehicles a year.

“There’s more than one compelling reason to stick with the existing footprint,” said James Rubenstein, a professor of Geography at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and a consultant in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Rubenstein’s recent paper, “The Emerging Geography of Electric Vehicle Production in North America: Revolution or Evolution?” looked at current and predictive data from S&P Mobility about where electric vehicles have been produced and where they will likely be produced in the coming years.

“It’s more cost efficient, from a variety of points of view, to re-equip an assembly plant to do electric. Increasingly, what we’re seeing are attempts to build multiple propulsion systems in the same factory, rather than building from scratch,” he said. “Basically, the dominant principle here, whether you’re a domestic or international carmaker, is to convert your existing plants rather than build yet a whole other set of them.”

That suggests the footprint of electric vehicle production will land right atop the footprint already made by the combustion engine. If so, that’s likely due to the fact that the conversion from ICE to BEV, despite the completely different power trains, is not as revolutionary as it might seem.

Assembly plants have, for years, been just that: factories that bring together parts made elsewhere. Engines, axles, gas tanks, wheels, dashboards, and electrical systems—everything but the body and chassis—have been outsourced for roughly 30 years.

“Most of the bits and pieces that go into an electric car are the same things that go into a gas car,” Rubenstein said.

Toyota, for instance, has recently invested $1.3 billion to produce electric vehicles at its facility in Georgetown, Ky. That plant has been making ICE vehicles since 1988 and hybrids since 2006. Working EVs into the production is just part of the flexibility that has long been part of kaizen—the Toyota manufacturing philosophy that favors efficient continuous improvement—according to Mike Clark, general manager of quality at Toyota North Carolina.

“If the mix is just shifting, from a competitive standpoint—for the best price to the customer—it makes sense to mod your factories rather than build new because new plants are very expensive,” Clark said. “Accepting a full battery pack versus an internal combustion engine is not so different. So yeah, there’s not a lot of change.”

Even if your company doesn’t have a brand-name philosophy, it may wind up making the same calculus.

“With a couple of exceptions, all assembly plants making electric vehicles are conversions from assembly plants that were making gas cars,” Rubenstein said. That includes Factory ZERO, which produced Impalas and Cadillacs when it was the prosaic Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly, as well as less gargantuan projects. Rivian’s immediate plan to delay production in Stanton Springs, Ga., means the company will continue making all its fully electric SUVs in a Normal, Ill., factory previously owned by Mitsubishi.

BMW’s Spartanburg, S.C., plant was designed for just such flexibility in mind.

“The ever-evolving auto industry has taught us much about the construction and operation of an interconnected plant,” said Nathalie Bauters, BMW’s head of corporate communications. “The building has a ‘finger’ structure, which allows the plant to run while we update or add additional ‘fingers’ for production. The center of the building serves as the hub of assembly, while the assembly line runs a loop inside each finger. These fingers can be extended for additional future production while the current production runs during construction.”

Even companies that have consciously tried to steer clear of car-industry culture wind up using its pre-existing infrastructure. Tesla, an Auto Alley outlier, began by producing its EVs out of a factory in Fremont, Calif., which is still its largest plant in the U.S. That Fremont plant had a previous existence making GM Buicks and Pontiacs, among many other models; in the 1980s and 1990s it retooled to begin assembly of Corollas and Geo Prisms for the Toyota/GM joint venture New United Motor Manufacturing.

For manufacturers that make both conventional vehicles as well as EVs, the flexibility of being able to make hybrids, fully electric vehicles, and ICE powered vehicles all in the same plant allows manufacturers to respond nimbly to unpredictable demand.

“The automotive industry is looking at profits quarter to quarter, so they have to be really careful about how the market is responding to some of the products,” said Laine Mears, a professor of automotive manufacturing at Clemson University. “If they’re already using their assembly plants for EVs, this slowdown in the market is just exacerbating that—making them think about not expanding outward.”