Lordstown Motors Says First-Year Electric Pickup Build Is Sold Out

A commercial fleet-focused electric pickup from Lordstown Motors Corp. (LMC) is sold out for its first year – if the startup secures the $450 million needed to retool a former General Motors Company (NYSE: GM) car plant to make full-size trucks.

LMC revealed a prototype of its Endurance on Thursday with Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Secretary of EnergyDan Brouillette in attendance.

“I really think this is a pickup truck 2.0,” CEO Steve Burns told FreightWaves in a June 23 interview. “We think we’ve really struck a good balance between a conservative pickup truck outer and a really fantastic underneath. It drives like a sports car.”

Prototype to production

Moving from prototype to production is uncertain despite Burns’ optimism.

GM technically can cancel LMC’s $40 million mortgage and take back the plant at the end of August. 

“GM has been pretty public. They’re not taking the plant back,” he said.

“We don’t feel like there’s any complications of losing the plant or anything like that,” Burns said. “We just want to get the funding so we can do the tooling and the reconfiguration of the plant and get through the crash testing and everything that has to happen to be a car company.”

Some reconfiguration is underway preparing for assembling full-size pickups where GM produced compact Chevrolet Cruze sedans until March 2019. At its peak, GM built 400,000 Cruzes a year on three shifts. LMC’s first-year goal is 20,000 Endurance trucks.

Lordstown Motors Corp. CEO Steve Burns says he is keeping all 6.2 million square feet of the former General Motors car assembly plant even though only 20,000 trucks are planned initially. (Photo: Lordstown Motors)

Burns is keeping the existing Lordstown footprint, anticipating higher production later while taking a deliberate approach to manufacturing now.

“We didn’t want to shrink anything and then later, when we’re trying to make 400,000 vehicles a year, say, ‘Man, I wish I wouldn’t have shrunk that.'”

Addressable market

Of the 2.8 million pickup trucks sold annually in the U.S., Burns estimates 600,000 are Class 1 work trucks weighing 6,000 pounds or less. LMC could produce that many Endurance trucks a year “if we’re fortunate to have [that] much demand.”

Another product could help use more of the plant. Burns won’t talk about the prospects of building the next-generation U.S. Post Service (USPS) delivery vehicle other than saying “fingers crossed.” 

The USPS extended until July 14 a deadline for proposals for a $6.2 billion contract to build 180,000 delivery trucks, according to Trucks.com. 

The Workhorse factor

Workhorse Group Inc. (NASDAQ: WKHS), where Burns was CEO until February 2019, is one of four finalists and has said It would subcontract LMC to build the trucks. 

The Cincinnati, Ohio-based Workhorse licensed the technology for its W-15 electric pickup to LMC in exchange for a 10% ownership stake in the company and royalties on the first 200,000 trucks it builds. The same technology would underpin the postal vehicle if Workhorse is selected. 

Hedge fund Formidable Asset Management LLC said in a June 19 research note the LMC stake could eventually be worth $1 billion to Workhorse.

Workhorse itself is focused on ramping up production of a composite body electric delivery van that can deploy a delivery drone, and has about 1,100 orders from UPS (NYSE: UPS) among others.