Slight changes to the big policy bill left the factory’s tax credits intact, according to the carmaker, which will use the batteries to make more affordable electric vehicles.
Environmental groups have generally viewed the big budget and policy bill passed by Congress last week as a catastrophe for electric vehicles and green energy projects. But the final version of the legislation leaves enough wiggle room to save at least one endangered battery factory.
Ford Motor said this week that a $3 billion plant it is building in Marshall, Mich., to produce batteries for electric vehicles will still qualify for federal tax credits thanks to last-minute tweaks to the bill’s language. Earlier versions would have excluded the project because it will use technology licensed from a Chinese company, Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd., known as CATL.
There is still plenty in the bill to make proponents of electric vehicles weep. It eliminates tax credits of up to $7,500 for people who buy electric vehicles, and it guts clean air regulations that encouraged carmakers to sell vehicles with no tailpipe emissions. The bill also imposes new restrictions that will make it harder for many companies to qualify for production tax credits they had counted on.
But the slight concessions in the final version of the legislation, which became clear only after experts had a chance to parse the fine print, suggest that at least some Republican lawmakers were aware that cuts in the bill would strike their constituents the hardest. Democratic legislation in 2022 inspired a boom in construction of battery factories and electric vehicle plants, primarily in Southern states where Republicans dominate.
In November, Donald J. Trump won 56 percent of the vote in Calhoun County, Mich., which includes Marshall. Ford has already begun hiring for the factory and expects to employ 1,700 people there.
Ford had said it would build the factory regardless of what happened to the tax credits. But elimination of the credits, which could be worth billions of dollars to Ford, would have made it much harder to operate the factory profitably.
