Former Lordstown Motors CEO Shows His Faith in Endurance

• LAS Capital, led by former Lordstown Motors CEO Steve Burns, purchased the Lordstown plant and will call the assets by the name of LandX, also with Burns as its majority owner.

• Some observers are skeptical about reviving the plant, saying required tooling investments will be heavy.

• The Endurance Truck trickled out of the plant from September 2022 until June 2023, packing a 109-kWh battery rated at 174 miles of range and capable of towing 8000 pounds with its wheel-hub motors.

Steve Burns, the former founder and CEO of Lordstown Motors—a company aiming to build electric pickups in a dormant General Motors plant in Ohio—has been reunited with that bankrupt company’s assets.

In a unique turn of events, Burns resigned from Lordstown in 2021 not long after a critical report on the state of the company from Hindenburg Research. Lordstown, which had delivered only a handful of trucks to customers (37 according to one court document), filed for bankruptcy protection in June of this year. That led to the remaining assets being put up for sale, and now Burns is back in the picture.

Burns is the founder, CEO, and majority shareholder of LAS Capital (land, air, and sea), which purchased the company’s remaining assets last month for a mere $10 million.

LAS has other transportation-related companies listed within its portfolio. Greenstreet makes an electric three-wheeler with 250 miles of range. Ryse is an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. And Blue Innovations Group (headed by Lordstown’s former vice president of propulsion, John Vo) is planning a 30-foot, 10-passenger electric day boat.

“All four of our companies have working prototypes and are in various stages of pre-production,” the company said.

Julio Rodriguez, who was the chief financial officer at Lordstown and resigned with Burns, is an “indirect manager” at LAS Capital, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) acquisition documents. The new entity that acquired the assets is to be called LandX, also with Burns as its majority owner.

No one else was interested in meeting the terms for the whole package, apparently. “Although the selling entities received several non-binding proposals for the purchase of specified assets, the selling entities through their board determined that none of these other proposals was a qualified bid in accordance with the bid procedures and determined LAS Capital to be the successful bidder under the bidding procedures,” the documents said.

It’s unclear exactly what’s in the $10 million asset sale, because some components came from outside sources. Included presumably are all assembly lines, related machinery, and other inventory, and of course a great deal of custom software and intellectual property. The factory building, with a GM/LG Energy Solution battery plant adjacent to it, is not part of the deal.

Committed to Producing Endurance Trucks

Burns told Autoweek he’s still committed to producing Endurance trucks. “I believed then, and I believe even more today, in what we built at Lordstown. That’s why I bought back the assets and rehired most of the engineering team. The customers who have driven the Endurance this past year, including the military, have helped prove our premise sound and our critics wrong.

“Our unique hub-motor platform provides greater simplicity as well as superior traction. We intend to build several exciting vehicles on the Endurance platform and look forward to announcing our full lineup soon.”

Some observers are skeptical. “The assets are not even worth $10 million,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst for transportation and mobility at Guidehouse Insights. “Lordstown never actually had hard tooling, and what it had is only able to build no more than a few hundred trucks. And there is no market for the Endurance, which has worse range than its competitors (174 miles), no support network, and unproven technologies.”