Last November, Lordstown Motors closed a deal to sell its manufacturing facility in Lordstown, Ohio to Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn. The factory was sold for $230 million, and could have been adorned with one of the banners that read “Under new management!” In addition, Foxconn also spent an additional $50 million to buy a stake in Lordstown Motors, opening a joint venture agreement to develop commercial electric vehicles for the North American and international markets. Part of the deal should have come with its own banner: “There’s a new sheriff in town.” That’s how you get the words of Foxconn Chairman Young Liu in an interview with Asia Nikkei newspapers, “Electric pickup trucks in partnership with Lordstown will start shipping in the second half of this year” and received interest from company executives. tram producer.
A few days later, Lordstown Motors posted a photo of at least three pre-production Endurance pickups at work. The caption explains, “Thanks to our partnership with Foxconn, our pre-production vehicles are being assembled and put into diverse test environments.” This will be the second foray into pre-production that we know of and people will hope it will be better than the first time. Last February, when powertrain engineers took one of the first Endurance prototypes for a first drive, the pickup caught fire after 10 minutes and burned down. None of the three engineers in vans was compromised, and of course that’s the point of prototyping and testing – to spot problems like fire risk before customers burn down their homes. We are sure that there have been many lessons learned over the past year that will make this latest version even better.
If Liu can be trusted, we will all find out within the next 11 months. When the factory is sold, the Lordstown executive (not Liu) said Endurance deliveries will start a quarter later than planned, in Q3 of this year. Liu’s new statement makes us think December could be more likely, especially if prototype testing has only recently begun. The lack of clarity about what and whens is an effect of more than just the Foxconn deal; Lordstown has a new CEO and CFO in August of last year, then detailed information about Endurance from its website as “a reminder to everyone that we are targeting fleet customers and so we don’t necessarily communicate with them through our website.” In addition, it is necessary to handle the investigations by US prosecutors in Manhattan and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
If prototype testing goes well, we think we’ll start hearing more about Endurance by the middle of this year. Meanwhile, Foxconn will be playing its own EV after introducing three of its own electric vehicle concepts, built on top of the Mobility in Harmony open EV architecture, and it also has a co-development agreement and build an EV Fisker called PEAR at Lordstown, Ohio, factory.
