Repeated falsehood on auto plants
By Lori Robertson
Posted on June 21, 2019
... Trump said of the U.S. auto industry in his June 18 rally in Orlando: “Many, many plants are now under construction in Michigan and Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida. They hadn’t built one in decades and now they’re all over the place.” It’s not true that the auto industry hasn’t built a new plant “in decades.” As for the “many, many plants … now under construction,” Bernard Swiecki, director of the Automotive Communities Partnership at the Center for Automotive Research, told us he knew of only two new assembly plants under construction or newly announced — a Toyota/Mazda joint venture plant in Alabama (announced in January 2018) and a Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) plant in Michigan (announced in February).
Swiecki sent us a list of the 12 assembly plants that have been announced in North America since 2009. Four of those were in the U.S., while eight went to Mexico and none to Canada ...
On Jan. 30, 2018, in his State of the Union speech, Trump similarly claimed: “Many car companies are now building and expanding plants in the United States — something we haven’t seen for decades.” At the time, we wrote that two new auto assembly plants had been announced in the nine years before Trump took office, as Kristin Dziczek, vice president of CAR’s industry, labor & economics group, told us.
In 2015, Volvo announced its first U.S. plant in Berkeley County, South Carolina — one of the states Trump mentioned in his June 18 rally. Volvo says on its website that it broke ground on the plant on Sept. 25, 2015 ...
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/06/trumps-repeated-falsehood-on-auto-plants/
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