Scout Motors is building its first factory from dirt, and it picked Blythewood, South Carolina to do it. The roughly $2 billion Production Center, backed by Volkswagen Group, will assemble the reborn Scout brand’s electric trucks and SUVs. Construction has been underway since 2024, with the first vehicles targeted to roll off the line at the end of 2027.
Project Scope
The plant is sized to build up to 200,000 vehicles a year at full capacity, about 40 an hour. Scout has since committed another $300 million to a supplier park on the same site, pulling parts production closer to the line to cut logistics cost and risk. South Carolina assembled an incentive package worth more than $1.2 billion to land the project, including roughly $400 million for site preparation, a sign of how hard states are competing for EV manufacturing anchors.
The Production Center joins a Southern manufacturing corridor that has absorbed a wave of EV and battery investment over the past five years, near other plants in the same wave like the Rivian plant at Stanton Springs in neighboring Georgia.
Why It Matters
Scout is a test of whether a legacy automaker can stand up a clean-sheet EV brand on a clean-sheet site without the cost overruns that have dogged the sector. The incentive math is already under scrutiny: reporting this year flagged the project running over its site-prep budget, with questions about who covers the gap. Build it on time and on budget, and Blythewood becomes a template. Miss, and it becomes a cautionary tale about how expensive these anchors really are. The trucks are due in 2027, and the schedule is the scoreboard.
Project Team & Details
| Developer | Scout Motors, Inc. |
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| Owner / Client | Scout Motors, Inc. (Volkswagen Group) |
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| Status | Under Construction |
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| Funding Source | Private |
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