Hyundai Motor Group has spent the last three years building a sprawling 2,900-acre campus 30 minutes from Savannah, Ga., to make electric vehicles and showcase the marvels of modern manufacturing.
Invited guests — and soon the public — can take tours of the factory. Visitors ride golf carts through cavernous halls, watching robots fetch parts for human workers. Mechanical arms weld panels onto the vehicle bodies.
Hyundai hoped the facility, in Ellabell, would become a shining example of car assembly, an image that also aligns with President Trump’s desire to re-industrialize the nation. Even its name, Metaplant America, nods at the company’s ambition to make a public statement, not just another assembly line.
But then, last month, more than 300 South Korean workers, who the United States said were working on the wrong kind of visas, were shackled and detained at one of the facilities under construction there, a battery plant jointly owned by Hyundai and LG Energy Solution, both Korean companies. The raid led many in South Korea to call on Hyundai to pause its expansion in the United States.
It is plowing ahead. Hyundai Motor Group, which includes Kia and dozens of other affiliates and suppliers, plans to spend $26 billion in the United States through 2028, including an additional $2.7 billion in Ellabell.
The carmaker has little alternative. As Chinese brands become increasingly popular elsewhere, the United States market is not only Hyundai’s biggest, but one of its best growth opportunities, regardless of who sits in the White House. Between very high tariffs and other restrictions, Chinese cars have in effect been shut out of the United States.
“My top three priorities are U-S-A,” José Muñoz, chief executive of Hyundai Motor Company, the car-making subsidiary, said at the company’s annual investor gathering after the raid in New York, pausing for effect after each letter. “If we do well here, it’s very good for Korea. It’s very good for the company.”
Yet risks abound. Electric vehicles have not been as popular in the United States as many expected. This month, the federal government stopped offering a $7,500 tax credit that was meant to encourage people to buy E.V.s. And, as the raid made plain, spending billions here is no guarantee of political favor. If anything, it demonstrated how foreign investment in the United States has become at once more urgent and more fraught in an age of “America First.”
Georgia’s political establishment strongly backs the plant, which is often described as the largest economic development project in state history. Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, views it as a part of his legacy.
But even before the raid, there were signs in Ellabell that tensions were building. Some residents abhorred the factory and the influx of foreigners it brought. Others have raised safety concerns, as three workers have died there since construction began. Yet some embraced the opportunities that have come with Hyundai’s investment.
Still the mixed response here reflects a deeper problem the company and others like it face in their desire to expand in Mr. Trump’s complicated America.
On a September afternoon, Tucker Sims sipped a beer at Rooster’s, a restaurant near the campus, as a group of South Korean workers sat together for lunch. A local handyman, Mr. Sims recounted seeing workers who appeared to be Latino plunge into a pond behind his house on the day of the immigration raid in an unsuccessful attempt to escape.
Mr. Sims said he welcomed the raid because he hated how Hyundai and its suppliers were changing the rural character of his hometown. He would never work in one of their factories, he declared, and neither would his relatives, even though the paper mill where some of them worked had recently shut down.
The mill “was American-owned,” Mr. Sims said.
Hyundai and LG are chaebols, powerful family-controlled conglomerates that occupy a special place in South Korean society. But American spokesmen for Hyundai have begun to describe the company as a global firm with Korean roots. In a sign of the growing importance of the U.S. market, this year’s annual investor day was held in Manhattan’s upscale Hudson Yards neighborhood, the company’s first such event outside Korea.
The Ellabell plant is the conglomerate’s third U.S. auto plant; it runs a factory in Montgomery, Ala., and a Kia plant in West Point, Ga. The company has pledged to create 8,500 jobs on the site by 2031, more than Ellabell’s population. About 3,200 people already work there.
With the American E.V. market growing more slowly than many carmakers had hoped, Hyundai plans to start making hybrids in Ellabell. It already manufacturers the all-electric Ioniq 5 crossover and Ioniq 9 sport utility vehicle. By 2030, Hyundai Motor Company aims to make more than 80 percent of all the vehicles it sells in the United States domestically, up from about 40 percent today.
“This is Hyundai’s moonshot,” said Brent Stubbs, chief administrative officer for the Metaplant.
The campus dwarfs everything in sight. The main two-lane road near the plant, dotted with mobile homes and handwritten signs advertising okra, has been renamed Hyundai Way. The grocery store, once a Piggly Wiggly, is now a Viet Huong Oriental Market. A staffing agency across the street advertises in English and Korean on its message board.
It’s not just Ellabell that is being transformed. Across the region, factories are sprouting up as Hyundai’s suppliers and subsidiaries follow the South Korean automaker from Seoul. About 45 minutes northwest, in Candler County, another South Korean company called DAS Corporation is building a $35 million factory to make metal frames for automotive seats. Doowon Climate Control America, which makes heaters and air-conditioners for E.Vs, is building a $30 million plant in Candler County as well.
Nate Collins, who grew up in Ellabell, had never traveled abroad before Hyundai hired him in 2023. Now he is about to take his third trip to South Korea to learn how to assemble the latest models.
“I’ve been living in Ellabell, Georgia, all my life,” said Mr. Collins, who had worked at a gun factory and a bar before he became a “floater” installing parts on Hyundai’s assembly line. “When something like this comes to an area like this and makes a dramatic change, I love every moment of it.”
One of his brothers works for a Hyundai supplier. Another does brisk business with a food truck outside a new hotel and truck stop that have opened near the plant, a sign that the plant has brought additional jobs to the community.
Hyundai has taken more than 250 American employees — like Mr. Collins — to Seoul to teach them not only how to make electric cars, but also about Hyundai’s history. New hires are trained in cross-cultural communication, and Korean language classes are offered at the plant. Managers practice toasting according to Korean tradition at corporate dinners.
Although Hyundai relied heavily on labor from South Korea and elsewhere to build its factories in Ellabell, about 80 percent of the car plant’s permanent employees come from the greater Savannah area, a spokeswoman said.
Still, some American workers say they have missed out on job opportunities because they are not Korean. Hyundai’s suppliers routinely recruit on Korean language websites in the United States, and say fluency in Korean is preferred.
In August, Bobby Dotson, who supervised a machine maintenance team in Ellabell for Hyundai Engineering America, a subsidiary, filed a lawsuit alleging that he was demoted because he did not speak Korean. Virtually all the training he received about the upkeep on the machines was in Korean, according to the lawsuit. Hyundai Engineering America declined to comment on the lawsuit but said it was committed to complying with U.S. employment law.
There have also been safety issues at the Ellabell campus. In May, a Michigan man was crushed to death by a metal structure at the E.V. battery plant, according to an incident report from the Bryan County Sheriff’s Office. In March, a forklift driver ran over another man, killing him, and another worker had to be evacuated after a pipe explosion. In 2023, a construction worker fell to his death at the car plant.
Hyundai said in a statement that it “strengthened safety oversight across the site” after the incidents.
Philip Lienert, a spokesman for LG Energy Solution, said the battery maker prioritized “the safety and well-being of our team at all our global operations.”
After the raid, U.S. officials arrested and expelled the South Korean technicians, saying they did not have the right kind of visas to install machines in a factory. But then the Trump administration reversed course and said it would allow that type of work on short-term visas after all.
Executives for Hyundai Motor Company, which gets roughly 27 percent of its revenue from the United States, have been eager to turn a page on the raid. The raid delayed completion of the on-site battery plant by two to three months, the companies have said. Still, Hyundai wasn’t counting on receiving batteries from the LG site until 2027, according to Mr. Stubbs, who said it had been buying cells from SK On, a rival of LG.
Jae Kim, president of the Southeast U.S. Korean Chamber of Commerce, which includes members who work for Hyundai and LG Energy Solution, acknowledged that familiarity with Korean culture could give an employee an edge, especially at this early stage when so many of the project’s leaders come from South Korea.
He also said that Ellabell was new to this kind of big investment from a foreign company and that residents probably needed more exposure to Hyundai and Korean culture. “When companies come, especially a new area where they are not used to foreign direct investment, they need to do a lot more hand-holding,” he said.
Back at the local restaurant in Ellabell, Mr. Sims acknowledged that it was too late now to stop the changes that Hyundai was bringing. Still, Hyundai’s attempt to put down American roots in Georgia doesn’t make a difference to him.
“It’s always going to be a foreign car,” he said.
Rebecca F. Elliott covers energy for The Times.
The post After an ICE Raid in Rural Georgia, Hyundai Keeps Betting on America appeared first on New York Times.
