In Wheel Time - Cartalk Radio

A giant EV factory can feel like a town’s future on opening day and like a crater on closing day. We sit down with Sunderesh Heragu, professor at Oklahoma State University and President of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers, to unpack what really happens when EV manufacturing plants, battery factories, or assembly projects get paused midstream. We talk about why EV production is built differently than internal combustion, and why that difference can make a restart or a quick replacement tenant harder than people expect.We also zoom out to the forces driving these decisions: gasoline prices, inflation, disposable income, and the uncertainty that freezes investment when executives can’t get a clean read on demand. Then we widen the lens even more, looking at global EV growth and the competitive pressure from overseas makers like BYD. Trade relationships, tariffs, and supply chain redesigns all show up in the background, shaping where the next wave of production could land and who might buy up idl