(Credit: Knoxville News Sentinel)
Tennessee will be meeting the future demand for electric vehicles, after Denso Corp. announced the company would spend $1 billion expanding its Maryville, Tennessee facility and hire 1,000 workers.
It comes as major automakers prepare to design new fleets of electric cars in response to the popularity of the Tesla electric car brand and the push for battery-powered vehicles overseas.
Denso’s investment would include safety components and systems for purely electric cars powered only by batteries as well as for hybrid vehicles like Toyota’s Prius that back up a gasoline engine with an electric motor.
The expansion would be the largest ramp up related to electric vehicles in Tennessee since Nissan borrowed $1.6 billion from the U.S. government’s green-car initiative in 2009. The company used the money to help cover the cost of preparing the assembly plant at Smyrna in Middle Tennessee for production of the Leaf electric car.