On a bright winter afternoon in Hardin County, Kentucky, I drive through a snowy residential neighborhood, rural enough for a bird of prey with a critter in its talons to fly above my windshield. Then, turning a corner, I come to a massive, sprawling factory actively being built.
Smokestacks pump. Bulldozers push dirt. There are actually twin factories going up, side by side. A steady stream of Korean specialists — here from their homes 6,000 miles away to train local workers — throw on hard hats and light cigarettes on their way into the plant. Somber warnings posted in English and Korean forbid anyone from capturing footage inside the plant. I loiter outside the metal detectors and the rest of the beefy security apparatus snapping photos on my phone until a guard hustles out ordering me to delete them. I feel like I’ve wandered into an exclusionary zone where a top-secret military base is being hastily constructed.
This is the electric vehicle battery plant BlueOval SK, a joint venture between American car giant Ford and the South Korean electric vehicle battery company SK On. Along with its sister plant in Tennessee, this will be the largest manufacturing project Ford has ever undertaken.
