TCCI Manufacturing’s new electric vehicle Innovation Hub in downstate Illinois is expected to open in November at a critical time in the commercial EV space.
That’s according to TCCI Senior Vice President Kara Demirjian, who said the electric compressor maker’s $45 million manufacturing facility will be a game changer for the state.
TCCI began supplying to commercial vehicle makers in the 1990s and its compressors, made in Decatur, can be found powering air-conditioning in trucks by Volvo and Freightliner to this day, as well as refrigeration units by Thermo King. More recently, however, the company has been working to adapt to the new order of things and by 2018 the transition to electric compressors became an important vision for the company.
Headquartered in Decatur, TCCI has facilities all over the world, including opening its first facility in China in 2006, and could have chosen anywhere for a new site to build its electric compressors. Global supply chain challenges exposed during the Covid pandemic showed TCCI that it needed to look homeward, however.
It became very obvious with Covid – through geopolitical, logistics and supply chain concerns – that we needed to look in the U.S.,” Demirjian told Chicago Inno.
While TCCI looked at other states such as Tennessee and Michigan for its new EV facility – giving a particularly close look at Knoxville, Tennessee – what brought TCCI back to Illinois was the partnership the company has with the state.
“We are looking to build a supply chain and ecosystem in Illinois, and a big piece of opening here was working hand-in-hand with the state on creating a workforce pipeline that other companies like Rivian, Lion Electric and Navistar struggle with,” Demirjian said.
The first recipient of the Reimagining Energy and Vehicles in Illinois Program – which provides incentives to businesses that expand in or relocate to Illinois to manufacture such things as electric vehicle parts, recycling products, and solar, wind and energy storage – TCCI received $21 million from the state, plus more than $2 million in tax incentives, to bring the $45 million project online.
TCCI, along with Gov. J.B. Prtizker and other state officials, broke ground on the facility a little over a year ago. It will be one of the first electric compressor production facilities in the U.S.
“Our ramp-up will start with these same-day delivery vehicles, anything that’s got to go back to a depot,” Demirjian said. “We definitely are seeing the school bus market, the bus and transit market, and the same-day delivery market are moving quickly.”
One of the main highlights of the new facility, she added, will be the publicly available climatic center, which is not slated to open until next year, but will present new opportunities to test EVs against harsh conditions in ways they couldn’t before.
“Most of the climatic centers you see are housed inside of the automotive industries as private facilities or within academic institutions, and are much smaller and not full, comprehensive facilities,” she said. “This is very different.”
Special thanks to Alex Zorn and the Chicago Business Journal.
https://www.bizjournals.com/chicago/news/2024/08/21/tcci-ev-manufacturing-hub.html
