A former General Motors executive is out and a onetime Ford Motor Co. leader is in — after a management shake-up at a Troy-based electric vehicle startup.
Electric Last Mile Solution (ELMS), which makes battery-powered delivery vehicles, said its top two executives resigned Feb. 1 after an investigation into their share purchases.
Jim Taylor, 65, resigned as CEO of ELMS, and Jason Luo resigned as chairman.
Taylor, an entrepreneur who has a colorful history with EV startups, was the subject of a Free Press profile in November about how he started ELMS.
Taylor spent the bulk of his career at GM. He started there in 1980 in Canada, and eventually made it to vehicle line executive for Cadillac in 1995. In 2005, he was promoted to president of Cadillac, then named CEO of Hummer in 2008. He stayed until Hummer was shuttered in 2010 amid GM’s bankruptcy restructuring.
Luo was the former CEO of Ford Great China in 2017-18 before going into private equity. Luo declined to comment.
In a Securities and Exchange filing, ELMS said a special committee of the board conducted an investigation that found, shortly before it announced an agreement to go public in December 2020, that some executives, including Taylor and Luo, bought equity at “substantial discounts to market value” without obtaining an independent valuation, meaning there was no third-party appraisal of the equity’s market value.
Taylor declined a request for an interview saying he could not speak to the news media.
Both Taylor and Luo remain as consultants to ELMS. The filing listed Taylor will receive $300,000 in the role as consultant; it did not list Luo’s salary.
ELMS said former Ford alum Shauna McIntyre, 50, has been named interim CEO of ELMS. McIntyre, who was on the ELMS board, is a former chief of staff at Google’s consumer electronics division.
She worked at Ford for five years, starting in 1995. There, she “instituted lean manufacturing principles in factories overseas, and later led final assembly production of the Ford Ranger” stateside, said ELMS spokesman Austin Stowe.
Former Intel chief Brian Krzanich was named ELMS nonexecutive chairman.
“Brian, the full Board and I want to assure all of our stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, investors and employees, of our continued focus and dedication to the company’s ongoing business and mission,” McIntyre said in a statement.
In the filing, ELMS also said it will have to restate its financial statements as of Dec. 31, 2020, and the nine months ended Sept. 30, 2021, as part of the investigation.
But Stowe said the company is continuing to run “business as usual.” Its small Urban Delivery electric van started production in September at the former Hummer plant in Mishawaka, Indiana.
Stowe said ELMS has completed testing of the van and is finalizing calibration and quality checks before those hit public roads shortly.
ELMS has plans for a larger Urban Utility electric delivery truck, which is on track to launch later this year, Stowe said.
More:As GM drops Chevy Spark, here are the most affordable vehicles from Detroit 3
More:GM investigates cause of vehicle fire at Proving Grounds in Milford
Contact Jamie L. LaReau: 313-222-2149 or jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.