CARS OF THE WORLD

Lordstown Endurance 2023.

Lordstown Motors began producing a pickup truck before a possible collapse next year.

The long-suffering electric car startup from the U.S. state of Ohio has reported that it has begun mass production of the Lordstown Endurance pickup truck.

Reason to rejoice? Not really: the production rate is still negligible, two cars are assembled, the third one will be assembled in a few days, and by the end of this year they plan to assemble 50 cars.

Well, next year might even be the last one for the young company — there is not much money left in the accounts, the time to introduce Endurance to the market was missed and competitors turned out to be more quick-witted.

American entrepreneur Steve Burns founded Lordstown Motors in 2018. He was planning to be the first to bring an electric pickup truck named Endurance to the market, for which he bought the unnecessary Lordstown (Ohio) plant in 2019 from General Motors Corporation with a capacity of 600 thousand vehicles a year.

Endurance was scheduled to begin production as early as the end of 2020, but, as is often the case with startups, the schedule went awry, and the COVID-19 pandemic created additional difficulties.

In the spring of 2021, the investment company Hindenburg Research published its own investigation accusing Burns and his company of fraud, namely of deceiving investors about the actual number of orders for Endurance: it turned out that instead of the claimed «more than 100 thousand orders» Lordstown Motors did not have a single major contract.

The investigation caused a scandal, investors turned their backs on Lordstown Motors, Burns left the company and its new management decided to sell the plant in Lordstown to the Taiwanese IT giant Foxconn, which is now rapidly entering the automobile business.

Now Lordstown Motors is leasing part of its former plant from Foxconn and yesterday issued a press release announcing that it has finally assembled the first two production Endurance cars.

The company is promising to assemble a third production Endurance out of the first batch of 500 cars the other day, with 50 of them scheduled for production by the end of this year and 450 in the first half of 2023.

And then — as it will go: the money received from Foxconn for the plant is running out, the current president and CEO of Lordstown Motors Edward Hightower will be trying to find new investors, while the auditors at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have expressed doubts that the company will be able to continue operations in 2023.

All in all, expectations are grim. Lordstown Motors did not manage to become the first in the market of electric pickups; Ford, GM and much more successful startup Rivian have already briskly entered this segment, and Rivian, loaded with orders, is experiencing great difficulties with production scaling.

It is not clear what is going on with Lordstown Motors’ orders; they are not accepting orders on the company’s website. Moreover, all specifications of Endurance and its price have been removed from the website.

It had previously said that the Lordstown Endurance would start at $55,000, that the power plant would consist of four motor-wheels with a combined output of 608 hp, that the on-board battery had a capacity of 109 kWh, that it had a range of 250 miles on a single charge, that acceleration to 60 mph (96.56 km/h) took 5.5 seconds, and that the top speed was 128 km/h.

If Lordstown Endurance is liquidated, its former plant will live on; Foxconn has big plans for it: for example, in 2024, the inexpensive electric car Pear by California startup Fisker will be put into production here on a contract basis.