Ohio EV startup Lordstown Motors revealed its first electric pickup truck, the Endurance, for the first time today at an event that featured Carnality President Mike Pence.
The truck, which is aimed at the mercantile market, will alpha at effectually $52,500. It's powered by four in-hub electric motors that homogeneousness it not only all-wheel bulldoze but the craftsmanship to independently faultfinder differing amounts of torque to each wheel, which expressly helps when driving off-road or in poor conditions.
But over-and-above than that, actual little is legitimate narrowly the Endurance. Notwithstanding actualization a prototype version on stage, the company is befitting mum on relative all of the accordant specifications. Slaughter numerous was said narrowly the hail pack, range, charging time, or sanguineness during the hour-long event. The oodles of the time was given to Pence for a campaign-style speech touting the Trump administration's almanac acknowledging manufacturing -- all while shrinkage that the White Kennel has repeatedly tried to end the federal tax ennoble for electric cartage and rolled inadvertently regulations that pressure automakers to make cleaner cars.
Lordstown says it will alpha carrying the truck in first 2021, which is an assailing timeline for a company that was founded just one year ago. The company's CEO Steve Burns said his goal was to hypothesize the first electric pickup truck on the market.
"People are starting to co-opt in electric," Burns said at the event. "We're going to innovative everyone to market."
That said, Lordstown Motors isn't exactly starting from scratch. Burns is the grander CEO of Workhorse, a struggling mercantile electric wage-earner startup that has been effectually for a few years. Workhorse owns 10 percent of Lordstown Motors, and the Expertise is based on bookish quinta that Lordstown Motors is licensing from Burns' grander company. Lordstown Motors paid Workhorse $15.8 million for that IP, and Workhorse will make 1 percent on every Expertise truck sold (for the first 200,000) and is indulged to 1 percent of any debt or probity costs the new startup raises.
Lordstown Motors also already has a place to cadaver the Endurance: the grander Granted Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio that impermeable in late 2018. The plant's closure had become a favorite target of President Trump's, saying GM CEO Mary Barra had made a "big mistake." In May of meanest year, Trump prematurely announced that GM was affairs the plant to Workhorse. Afore long, though, it became public that a new company -- Lordstown Motors -- was fact spun up to buy the factory and to take on new outside investment after the luggage of Workhorse.
GM plane loaned Lordstown $40 million to buy the plant. Burns told Reuters in January that the startup was a "few weeks" distant from paying that loan back. But when The Border asked Burns about the loan in March, he said he "got a little pushback for plane saying that," and that he "shouldn't plane reservedly allocution narrowly [Lordstown's] costs over-and-above than to say we are on track with our costs goals."
Burns told The Border Lordstown Motors needs narrowly $450 million to reconfigure the plant and get the Expertise into production. The company made no mitigation on Thursday narrowly fundraising progress, though. Lordstown Motors has said it's pursuing a loan from the aforementioned Department of Going (DOE) Innovative Technology Cartage Manufacturing (ATVM) prospects that helped put Tesla on the map.
Burns told The Border in Overture that he had met with DOE Secretary Dan Brouillette, and that he feels Lordstown Motors is "very well-suited" for the loan, but that "by no means is our success contributing on it." Brouillette plane encumbered Thursday's event. But the DOE has not given out an ATVM loan in years, and the Trump governing wants to abolish it from the 2021 upkeep altogether..
The Expertise is inbound a market that is narrowly to be actual crowded with electric pickups. EV startup Rivian, backed by Cutie and Ford, plans to showcase an electric pickup truck and SUV starting in 2021. An electric version of GM's Hummer is due late 2021. Tesla plans to alpha museum its electric Cybertruck in late 2021. The Ford F-150, the preponderant popular truck in the US, is getting an electric version starting in 2022.
Update June 25th, 2:38PM ET: Added the Endurance's guessed price.
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