After years when Detroit was Ground Zero for skepticism about electric vehicles, the traditional auto industry’s hometown has become a hub of EV action.

The trend is attracting companies, cash and jobs – potentially including jobs for engineers and executives displaced by restructuring at General Motors and Ford.

At the same time, established automakers and suppliers are boosting their work on EVs at their local engineering centers, making southeast Michigan one of the world’s centers of EV development.

Companies come for the region’s talent, a bounty of engineers and executives who know how to turn ideas into vehicles that start every day, survive crashes and can be built by the million.

“For more than a century, companies in and around Detroit have refined complex electromechanical devices to make them smaller, cheaper and more reliable for mass-market use in cars,” said John Voelcker, former editor of Green Car Reports.

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