Electric vehicles are all the rage at the four-unit brick building in McKinley Park where three generations of the Breems family live. After years of encouragement from Joel Breems, the only sibling who does not live at the building, Kara Breems and her husband, Tony Adams, bought a Tesla Model Y in August. So did the other Breems sibling, Daniel, and his wife, Heather.
Not to be outdone, the siblings’ parents, Helen and Brad, took the plunge a few weeks later, bringing home a third EV, a royal blue Kia EV6. “We’re all super-excited,” said Kara Breems, 48. The Breems family is part of a good news-bad news story on EV sales that’s making for seemingly contradictory headlines, including one — “GM scales back EV plans” — that’s displayed prominently in an ad that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been running in the key battleground state of Michigan.
Electric vehicles, like the ones made by over 8,000 Central Illinois workers at Rivian Automotive's manufacturing facility in Normal, continue to grow in the United States. But that growth is not coming at the pace of 2021 to 2022, when estimated annual increases were 89% and 65%, according to data from Cox Automotive, an automotive services and technology provider. Visitors look over a 2024 electric R1T pickup truck at the Rivian display at the Electrify Expo on July 14.
All Rivian electric trucks and SUVs are made at its manufacturing facility in Normal. The 2023 annual increase was 46%, and i.