Why aren't there any automotive plants in the southern gulf coast states?

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Why aren't there any automotive plants in the southern gulf coast states?

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Your picture shows plants in two of them.

workforce issues probably

Are you going to build a multi-billion dollar plant, the loss of which will impact your bottom line for months to years in a place where hurricanes regularly come in and frick up the infrastructure? The I-20 corridor has much of the transportation benefit of the I-10 corridor, but with less of the violent windy parts. I'd 100% build something like that up near the I-20 corridor before the I-10 corridor.

That's part of the reason why. Things like chemical plants and shipping depots are more resilient to wind and can tolerate being much closer to the Gulf. Giant fricking buildings, not so much.

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Not in the southern portion of them.

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Well, for the most part, the population is concentrated in the northern portions of those states.

True except for MS. Most people live in southern Mississippi than northern.

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Are you going to build a multi-billion dollar plant, the loss of which will impact your bottom line for months to years in a place where hurricanes regularly come in and frick up the infrastructure?

That's part of the reason why. Things like chemical plants and shipping depots are more resilient to wind. Giant fricking buildings, not so much.

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You might be right.

General Motors operated a plant near Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City that was hit by a tornado TWICE; and both times rebuilt and reopened. But it was one of the GM plants that was closed during the recession.

That being said, chemical plants and refineries also don't really store inventory outside. They are usually in tank farms nearby. Where automotive plants do seem to stage finished product right outside the plant.

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Are you going to build a multi-billion dollar plant, the loss of which will impact your bottom line for months to years in a place where hurricanes regularly come in and frick up the infrastructure?

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In Montgomery, the Hyundai plant asked the Air National Guard not to fly over the building because they were concerned the vibration would affect the quality of the automated paint process. Some of these processes are pretty environment-sensitive.

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100% build something like that up near the I-20 corridor before the I-10 corridor.

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Funroe finna eat

It's part geography and part network effect.

Transportation costs are generally lower, as those areas are more centrally located to the national centers of population (Southeast, Atlantic Seaboard, Midwest, West Coast) while still being in lower cost places for production. They are also almost all close to major transportation arteries. When you're producing stuff at that scale with a very, very widely distributed footprint of end customers (as opposed to, say, Boeing in Charleston or Airbus in Mobile, where you're shipping to only a few customers in some pretty specific places, and it makes more sense to be located near a major port for importing certain goods and can ship out to only a few customers), the transportation costs matter a lot.

There's also a network effect where a handful of manufacturers will locate to a certain place then a few Tier I suppliers will follow, then a few Tier II's, then...it adds up and all of the sudden you have a major locus of production in a certain industry. Same thing happened in auto in Michigan and Ohio in the middle of the 20th century.

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One of those companies are not like the others...

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ExxonMobil