Inside a colossal new plant, about 13 football fields long, the employees of SK Battery America are at work 24/7, essential players in the high-stakes early days of a worldwide battle to build the motors of the future.

The sweeping new climate bill just passed in Congress allocates nearly $400 billion over 10 years to encourage the clean energy transition and the growth of factories precisely like this one: A gleaming gray structure, midway through the semirural stretch of Georgia between Atlanta and Greenville, S.C., where the exurbs are encroaching, life is getting more expensive and a job building an electric car doesn’t mean you can afford one, at least not yet.

In green, taupe, teal and navy uniforms color-coded to their specific role — engineer, operator, maintenance, quality control — masked workers shuffle carts filled with half-finished parts between mechanical stations arranged like cavernous grocery aisles.

Supervisors peek at tablet screens, tweaking dials, overseeing the robotic orchestra tucked behind thin, sterile walls of glass. A dizzying range of machines pirouette perfectly around one another, chopping, welding and packaging: an ensemble that turns raw, rhino-size rolls of copper and aluminum coated with nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite into small but mighty packets — battery cells. Each one no longer or heavier than a hardback book.

All told, once packed and charged together and inside a new Ford F-150 Lightning, these lithium-ion batteries can make that all-electric truck, weighing in at over three tons, lurch forward from 0 to 60 miles per hour in just about four seconds.

“Listen, I drove it home last night, it’s badass,” said Cody Cain, the general manager at Billy Cain Ford, the local dealership owned by his father, Billy, which sits one mile away from the battery plant. “It’s an unbelievable vehicle.”

On a spin down the two-lane roadways of northeast Georgia’s Appalachian foothills, a display model of the Ford Lightning whizzes along. The truck wields the force of a 580 horsepower motor with silent ferocity, and zero carbon emissions — indistinguishable from its gas-powered brethren aside from the absence of exhaust pipes and roars from the front grill.

The Lightning, Mr. Cain noted, also doubles as a mobile generator — able to juice up various tools at a work site, recharge your home if the power goes out in a storm, or plug in anything on a camping trip. Great for big families, contractors or coaches, something Mr. Cain, 41, and a former college baseball player, has been himself.

In the near future, the so-called Rust Belt, along with the Deep South, could become the Battery Belt. And the F-150 Lightning, paired with its growing slate of American-made competitors, could offer an all-around win: manufacturing revitalized, gas money saved, and the potential to curb the transportation sector’s leading 27 percent share of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. A clean energy transition temptingly driven by strong, spacious, all-American vehicles with cultural cachet. A solution without sacrifice. Carrots, not sticks.

The problem is Mr. Cain and other dealers sell cars and trucks to people in the here and now. And right now, he says, “they’re not buying electric because there are none.”

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In terms of availability, it’s barely an exaggeration. The global supply chain crisis has hobbled automotive production, hurting the industrywide ramp up in electric vehicles. “We’re still delivering Broncos that we ordered two years ago,” Mr. Cain said, referring to Ford’s new gas-powered rival to the Jeep. “So the same thing is going to happen on this vehicle.”

The good news — that consumer demand for the Lightning is high — is often overwhelmed by the bad. People may have to wait three years for a truck. Another problem: Even if the Lightning were available, Mr. Cain said, “In Jackson County, where we are in Commerce, Georgia, there’s not a lot of people that can afford it.”

The median individual income in Jackson County is $32,051. This past week, Ford announced that prices for the 2023 Lightning will now range from about $47,000 to $97,000 — a jump of $8,500 for some models. That effectively erases much of the purchasing power granted by the fresh tax credit on offer from the government for purchasing a new E.V., worth up to $7,500.

The average price for a new E.V. is more than $66,000 — and up 14 percent on a yearly basis. This puts the electric vehicle transition in an anxious limbo: To pull off a real cultural shift, industry analysts and E.V. enthusiasts say, cars that plug in can’t remain exclusive to the curious and privileged for much longer. They’ll need to be physically and financially accessible enough to as many people as possible — and soon enough to generate the momentum needed to propel them from an experiment to a sustainable norm.

“In the worst time in the world,” Mr. Cain said. “We want to push all of this electric down people’s throat, when there’s no parts.”

In his 18 years managing Billy Cain Ford, Mr. Cain — a father of three and a city councilman in nearby Jefferson, Ga., 15 minutes down the road — typically has seen the car lot filled from front to back, with new and used, small and large. A joint victory for him and those fighting climate change will mean a dealership lot full of more economical E.V.s.

These days, it’s barren. Mr. Cain has just a few vehicles here and there, and a lone Ford Lightning sitting outside, as part of “the Mannequin Program,” he says, “just to show it off.” Not for sale.

Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, which retains a more than 60 percent share of the U.S. electric vehicle market, has declared that “lithium batteries are the new oil.”

If the analogy holds, that puts Commerce, and the bet the local government has made by luring SK Battery America, the U.S. subsidiary of a South Korean energy conglomerate, in early gold rush territory.

The Georgia factory is expected to produce 21.5 million kilowatt-hours in annual capacity that could power over 430,000 new electric vehicles each year once site construction is fully complete. Last month, Ford sealed an agreement with SK to expand their joint venture, building three battery facilities in Tennessee and Kentucky. The manufacturing facility, which also produces batteries for a Volkswagen E.V., is now up to about 1,900 employees, and is hiring roughly 50 employees a week, at base pay of about $18 an hour, more than twice the state’s minimum wage.