Lordstown Motors Endurance: An electric truck from Ohio

[EngieDiesel]

It occurred to me that this doesn't seem to have been mentioned, and as an Ohio resident I would be remiss to not bring some attention to it. Taking over the massive GM assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio that formerly built the Chevy Cruze and was shuttered last March, the recently founded Lordstown Motors Corp., backed by electric work truck maker Workhorse Group, will be building a full-size electric truck called the Endurance. A working prototype was debuted last Thursday (complete with Mike Pence glad-handing everyone... it is an election year after all), with production planned to start sometime in 2021.



All wheel drive, estimated MSRP is $52,500 before the federal tax credit, estimated range is "at least 250 miles" with a towing capacity of 7,500 pounds. There are currently 14,000 preorders on the books, according to this article. I have to say I'm very interested in this, not just because it's coming from Ohio but also because it adds even more competition to what's looking to be a very interesting time for EV development. There's a lot of new names with big backers coming onto the scene, and the more serious investment there is in the technology, the better and more affordable it will become.

And hey, it doesn't look like it fell out of a Playstation 1 game either, so that's a bonus too.

 

[Joey D]

Those wheels are pretty rad, or are those the actual motors sticking through?

 

[EngieDiesel]

Those wheels are pretty rad, or are those the actual motors sticking through?

The cover picture on the specs page shows them in a more traditional silver color, and you can see the orange bit shining through the spokes. I'm guessing it's a fancy cover behind the actual rim to give the in-hub motors some protection from mud/dirt/road debris, most likely? They appear to be positioning this as a work truck primarily, so it would make sense.

 

[05XR8]

Does it come with a Light Cycle from TRON?

 

[Eunos_Cosmo]

It's not good looking. But that's an improvement over the Cybertruck.

 

[kikie]

This truck looks really good. It's a direct competitor for the Rivian truck.

 

[Northstar]

It may just be the lack of obscene levels of chrome, but I think it looks fairly decent.

 

[Crash]

Those wheels are pretty rad, or are those the actual motors sticking through?

Those looks like heat sinks, so I would expect it's part of or attached to the motor somehow to enable heat transfer.

 

[EngieDiesel]

Lordstown Motors is going to be a publically traded company to supplement its financial backing from other investors, and apparently GM has a much larger stake in this as was previously believed...

Burns (who had left Workhorse) started Lordstown Motors, which reportedly borrowed $40 million from GM to buy the factory. Workhorse sold the intellectual property for its pickup truck to Lordstown Motors for $15.8 million and took a 10 percent stake in the new startup. Burns and Lordstown Motors also agreed to give Workhorse 1 percent on every Endurance truck sold (for the first 200,000) and 1 percent of any debt or equity financing — meaning Burns’ old startup also stands to benefit from Lordstown Motors going public.

Lordstown Motors’ ties to GM didn’t stop at the factory loan. GM is investing $75 million in the go-public transaction and gets a seat on the startup’s board of directors — though just $25 million of that is cash, according to an investor presentation filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The other $50 million comes in the form of “plant assets,” “plant permits,” and operating costs at the factory that GM has covered since Lordstown Motors took over in November 2019. Lordstown Motors will use “GM components” in the Endurance, as the Detroit automaker is hooking the startup into its Tier 1 supply chain.

So now we have Ford-backed Rivian and GM-backed Lordstown, in addition to Ford and GM bringing their own offerings to the same market eventually, and Tesla making moves to get the Cybertruck out before all of them. Things are gonna get pretty interesting in the electric truck sector over the next couple years...

 

[EngieDiesel]

The Endurance currently has 40,000 preorders scheduled. At $50,000 per vehicle (to start anyway) that's a potential $2 billion in sales if none are cancelled and all are fulfilled.

Also, the dashboard looks pretty nice, and this is coming from someone who despises touchscreens in cars:

 

[EngieDiesel]

Yeah, it's mostly a publicity thing and the F-150 driver was asleep at the wheel there, but seeing the comments from irate Ford fanboys and anti-EV types is always good for a laugh regardless.

 

[CodeRedR51]

 

[EngieDiesel]

The more I follow this now, the more I'm convinced that GM is just going to quietly buy up the operation at a fire sale price when it goes under, take the existing truck and slap an ugly Silverado front end on it. Which was probably the plan all along, because there has been some incredibly shady stuff going on with this whole operation.

To say I'm disappointed about this is an understatement.