The future was supposed to have arrived this year in a cluster of counties just east of Atlanta in the form of a state-of-the-art factory that would churn out 400,000 electric vehicles a year. But when JoEllen Artz looks about her lifetime neighborhood, all she sees are holes.
“Those shovel holes they made in the ground? That’s it,” she said of the planned site of a Rivian manufacturing plant. “It’s awful, awful.”
The problem is not a lack of funds. On the promise of thousands of jobs, elected officials in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta have pledged some $8 billion to the project, including a $6.5 billion loan the Biden administration green-lit in its final hours.
Those loans are just two of the huge public bets, or investments, that state capitals and Washington, D.C., have made on EVs. While no one has calculated exactly how many federal and state dollars both Republican and Democratic elected officials have sent to that green sector, experts RealClearInvestigations consulted fixed the total north of $100 billion.
Overhanging that massive spending, however, is the issue of demand for EVs, or more precisely, the lack of it. In 2025, Rivian said it sold 25,000 EVs in the U.S., far below estimates of 40,000 to 51,000 vehicles. The company’s revenues were flat in 2024 and 2025, coming in around $5 billion. The Georgia plant was supposed to open this year, but the ribbon-cutting is now slated for 2028, according to the company.
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