Embattled electric truck company Lordstown Motors parked a single Endurance pickup in a sad little corner of the 2022 ACT Expo– then closed a $230 million joint-venture deal with Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn. (!?)
It seemed for a while that the fledgling electric pickup company that was endorsed by then-President Trump would really happen, bringing thousands of high-paying manufacturing jobs to the Lordstown, Ohio neighborhood. Then it all fell apart– the 100,000 plus “orders” it claimed to have on the books weren’t real, an advanced prototype burned itself to the ground, and the company brought a massive, public humiliation upon itself after its much-hyped Endurance race truck broke down after 40 miles of running. GM, after initially supporting the project, bailed in a similarly public horrorshow of bad PR.
Things, as they say, didn’t look good for Lordstown, and the lone, unattended Endurance truck we saw at the ACT Expo this week didn’t paint a rosy picture, either. “They’re done,” we said. “Why are they even here?”
How wrong we were! Less than 48 hours after we snapped the photo, at top, the company announced a $230 million sale of its Ohio factory to Foxconn, who will being building the Endurance electric pickup under a new joint venture before the year is out.
First Nikola, now Lordstown? If you saw this in a Hollywood movie you’d call it a stretch– but here we are! The only real question now is: which electric also-ran will rise from the ashes, next?
Lordstown Factory in Ohio
SOURCE | IMAGES: LORDSTOWN MOTORS.
