The Lordstown Endurance Doesn't Have What It Takes

A drive of the Lordstown Endurance in best experienced in a vacuum: A space with no EV rivals, no market reality to intrude on the steady hum of four utterly pointless wheel hub motors.

This Michigan spin in a pre-production Endurance, together with a brave face shown by company executives—including newly appointed CEO Edward Hightower — forces me to at least reconsider Lordstown, Ohio’s troubled EV start-up. But any illusion quickly dissolves, as it has from the beginning, when Lordstown’s founders and political enablers first began to play on the hopes and dreams of struggling workers and residents of Ohio’s Mahoning Valley. Here in 2022, the questions still hover like gnats around a company that appeared a Hail Mary play from the start, and has become a fumbled football of unmet promises, financial struggles and shenanigans, and revolving-door management.

The ascension of Hightower to CEO—a veteran executive engineer of Ford, GM, and BMW, and the first African-American automaking chief in more than a century—at least put an experienced automaker in charge.

Yet since it went public in a SPAC merger, the company burned through about $700 million. And Lordstown was recently forced to sell its most valuable asset for a nearly $260 million lifeline: Its former General Motors factory in Ohio, to Taiwan’s Hon Hai Technology Group. It’s better known as Foxconn, assembler of the iPhone, last seen bamboozling Wisconsin on an epic scale with phony promises of a $10 billion LCD factory and American jobs. Then-President Trump helped broker the Foxconn folly with the Wisconsin GOP, shoveled dirt at a groundbreaking, and trumpeted this midwest Potemkin Village as “the eighth wonder of the world.” Going full circle, Trump’s public browbeating of General Motors helped lay the ground for Lordstown Motors.

Moving on to Ohio, Foxconn now plans to build the Endurance in a joint partnership with Lordstown. Foxconn claims it’s going to build Fiskers there, too. How many Lordstown trucks? At this drive for North American Car, Truck and Utility of the Year candidates, Hightower confirms the company plans to deliver 50 trucks by year-end, and roughly 450 more through the first half of 2023. One customer has publicly broken cover, with the Port of San Diego agreeing to buy…wait for it…two Endurances. This trickle of trucks will spring from a former GM factory that churned out 290,000 Chevy Cruzes in 2014, and still lost money doing it. To fill that galaxy-size gap, Foxconn plans to build Fisker Pears, or maybe develop EVs of its own. If none of this adds up to the next Tesla, maybe they can all convert Lordstown into the world’s biggest indoor pickleball facility.

Lordstown’s very birth struck some observers at the time (including myself) as cynical expediency: A feel-good bid to save Ohio manufacturing jobs, at the shuttered GM plant that Trump was compulsively attacking the company and CEO Mary Barra for closing. Lordstown’s (now-departed) founder and CEO Steve Burns was an underfunded automaking newbie. But GM essentially gifting Burns its oft-beleaguered Lordstown plant—where it had produced everything from Chevy Vegas to Cruzes from 1966 to 2019—got Trump off their back. The President got to boast at a White House photo op with the Endurance. By summer 2020, Mike Pence rode onto a Lordstown stage in an Endurance prototype to throw more shade at GM, and raise the hopes of blue-collar Mahoning Valley.

"After a heartbreaking day in 2019, to see this kind of a comeback—I hope you see it's a testament to the confidence the people of this company have in the people of this community," said Pence. “Lordstown is going to be back big time.”

Today, Lordstown’s footprint is a frigid hotel parking lot in Ann Arbor, where I hop aboard a pre-production Endurance. Hightower, to his credit, shows up to field questions about the company, whose long march to production has lately been dogged by supply-chain snafus.

“It’s all about the fundamentals,” Hightower says during a chat that evening, outlining plans to drag this truck over the finish line. Even as market Goliaths like Ford and GM look to saturate the electric pickup fleet business—from municipal, utility or airport fleets to contractors and landscapers—Hightower insists there’s room for a smaller player like Lordstown.

Hightower acknowledges the Bill of Materials for an Endurance—basically everything that goes into building a finished truck — is currently higher than its $65,060 price, up from about $53,200 at the truck’s debut. The balance sheet will improve, he said, when the company can complete hard tooling at the Ohio factory and produce trucks in higher quantities.