The Lordstown Endurance is a full-size battery electric

pickup truck A pickup truck or pickup is a light-duty truck that has an enclosed cabin, and a back end made up of a cargo bed that is enclosed by three low walls with no roof (this cargo bed back end sometimes consists of a tailgate and removable covering) ...

with

wheel hub motor The wheel hub motor (also called wheel motor, wheel hub drive, hub motor or in-wheel motor) is an electric motor that is incorporated into the hub of a wheel and drives it directly. History * First wheel motor concept: Wellington Adams of ...

s manufactured by

Lordstown Motors Lordstown Motors Corporation (LMC) is an American electric vehicle automaker located in Lordstown, Ohio. The company is based at the Lordstown Assembly plant which previously belonged to General Motors. History Lordstown Motors was founded ...

in collaboration with

Foxconn Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., trading as Hon Hai Technology Group in China and Taiwan and Foxconn internationally, is a Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturer established in 1974 with headquarters in Tucheng, New ...

at its Ohio factory. The Endurance entered production in September 2022. It is the company's first production automobile.

History

Development began as the range-extended electric vehicle

Workhorse A draft horse (US), draught horse (UK) or dray horse (from the Old English ''dragan'' meaning "to draw or haul"; compare Dutch ''dragen'' and German ''tragen'' meaning "to carry" and Danish ''drage'' meaning "to draw" or "to fare"), less ofte ...

W-15 in 2016. The automotive press got their first impressions of the W-15 at a May 2017 event held in

Long Beach, California Long Beach is a city in Los Angeles County, California. It is the 42nd-most populous city in the United States, with a population of 466,742 as of 2020. A charter city, Long Beach is the seventh-most populous city in California. Incorporate ...

. A prototype W-15 was shown in August 2018, fitted with a gasoline

range extender A range extender is a fuel-based auxiliary power unit (APU) that extends the range of a battery electric vehicle by driving an electric generator that charges the vehicle's battery. This arrangement is known as a series hybrid drivetrain. The ...

sourced from BMW. Steve Burns, the CEO of Workhorse, left that company to help found the automotive startup

in autumn 2019. The W-15 design was licensed in November 2019 to Lordstown in exchange for a 10% minority stake in the latter company, and Workhorse paused further development of the W-15. In the second half of December 2019, Lordstown Motors presented the first preliminary information about its vehicle. The

electric Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described by ...

design was renamed to the Lordstown Endurance, adopting an avant-garde design that combines the classic proportions of a semi-truck with lighting that forms a single line with embossing. The W-15 forms the basis of the Endurance, although there are significant differences. In mid-June 2020, Lordstown presented the first official sketches showing the appearance of the passenger cab of the Endurance, while the world premiere of the pickup took place on June 25 of the same year. A prototype Endurance caught fire 10 minutes into its first test drive in January 2021 and was completely destroyed. Details of the fire were not released publicly until February 2021;

Hindenburg Research Hindenburg Research LLC is an investment research firm with a focus on activist short-selling founded by Nathan Anderson in 2017 and based in New York City. Named after the 1937 Hindenburg disaster, which they characterize as a human-made avoidab ...

, a short-seller of Lordstown stock, published a report in March alleging that Lordstown had inflated preorder numbers to boost investor confidence and provided further details about the fire gleaned from a police report. In June 2021, company officials said they planned to begin

production Production may refer to: Economics and business * Production (economics) * Production, the act of manufacturing goods * Production, in the outline of industrial organization, the act of making products (goods and services) * Production as a stati ...

in fall 2021, even though the company had no firm orders for the truck, as they had sufficient capital to produce into 2022. Also in June, Lordstown CEO Steve Burns and CFO Julio Rodriguez resigned as a result of an investigation into preorders sparked by Hindenburg's report. The company warned that it had experienced difficulty securing sufficient funding to begin full production, and stated that the it reported in its latest quarterly SEC filing would not be enough to get to "full commercial production." In August of that year, Workhorse divested most of its share in Lordstown. In September 2021, Lordstown announced the factory would be sold to

for $280 million to raise the capital needed to start production; Lordstown would enter a contract with Foxconn to manufacture the Endurance. The first vehicles were unveiled in an October 2021 event held jointly by Foxconn and Lordstown. The factory sale to Foxconn closed in May 2022.

Production

Production of the Endurance is planned to take place at the former

General Motors The General Motors Company (GM) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Automotive industry, automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, United States. It is the largest automaker in the United States and ...

Lordstown Assembly The Lordstown Complex is a factory building and automotive manufacturing plant in Lordstown, Ohio, U.S. Lordstown is an industrial suburb of Youngstown, Ohio. It was a General Motors automobile factory from 1966 to 2019, comprising three faci ...

factory, which are in the village of the same name in the

U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its sover ...

of Ohio, and formerly were owned by Lordstown Motors until they were sold to Foxconn in 2021. Originally, production was to start in 2020, but due to the

COVID-19 pandemic in Ohio The COVID-19 pandemic was confirmed to have reached the U.S. state of Ohio on March 9, 2020, when the state's first cases were reported. The first death from COVID-19 in Ohio was reported on March 19. Subsequently, records supported by further ...

, it was postponed to 2021, and in June 2021, this was pushed back to fall 2021 following revelations about a lack of confirmed orders. Production was delayed again in October 2021 to April 2022 after Lordstown announced it was selling the factory to Foxconn. A month later, Lordstown announced that production would be delayed to the third quarter of 2022 due to supply chain issues. Commercial production began on September 29, 2022; Lordstown expects to produce 50 Endurance vehicles in 2022 and up to 450 more in the first half of 2023.

Design

Workhorse W-15

The W-15 had an all-wheel drive powertrain driven by two traction motors, one each for the front and rear axles, with a combined output of . These motors drew from a battery carried between the frame rails consisting of 6,000 cells from Panasonic; gross capacity was 60 kW-hr, but the useable capacity was limited to 40 kW-hr for longevity. The all-electric range was estimated to be . There was an onboard gasoline tank and three-cylinder range extender that added an additional ; the 0.7 L I-3 had an estimated output of and . Estimated consumption was on electricity, dropping to for the EPA city/highway driving cycles, respectively. The truck was approximately the same size as contemporary half-ton crew cab pickup truck competitors such as the

Honda Ridgeline The Honda Ridgeline is a midsize pickup truck manufactured by Honda. The Ridgeline is the only pickup truck currently produced by Honda. The Ridgeline is built using a unibody frame, a transverse-mounted engine, and is only offered in a crew–cab ...

and Toyota Tundra, at long riding on a wheelbase of , but was wider than most by approximately at . The body of the W-15 was made of carbon fiber-reinforced composite materials and was based on the design of the Chevrolet Silverado. Larger W-25 and W-35 models were planned. The stated capacities were of cargo in the bed and towing. It weighed approximately and had a

GVWR Vehicle weight is a measurement of wheeled motor vehicles; either an actual measured weight of the vehicle under defined conditions or a gross weight rating for its weight carrying capacity. Curb or kerb weight Curb weight (U.S. English) or kerb ...

of .

Powertrain

While the W-15 was a range extended electric pickup, the Endurance eschews the range extender and is a plug-in electric vehicle only that uses four individual

s. As announced at its premiere in June 2020, the Endurance will be the first consumer-market EV to use in-hub motors; the combined output is estimated to be , with a total peak / continuous torque output of . The Endurance will be able to tow trailers up to . The estimated range was using a high-voltage storage battery of unknown capacity. For the production Endurance, the output was revised to and with a total range of , with a towing capacity of . The hub motors are licensed from

Elaphe Propulsion Technologies ''Elaphe'' is a genus of snakes in the family Colubridae. ''Elaphe'' is one of the main genera of the rat snakes, which are found in many regions of the northern hemisphere. ''Elaphe'' species are medium to large constrictors by nature. Altho ...

, a company based in

Slovenia Slovenia ( ; sl, Slovenija ), officially the Republic of Slovenia (Slovene: , abbr.: ''RS''), is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the southeast, an ...

. Each in-hub motor weighs approximately , which increases the

unsprung mass The unsprung mass (colloquially unsprung weight) of a vehicle is the mass of the suspension, wheels or tracks (as applicable), and other components directly connected to them. This contrasts with the sprung mass (or weight) supported by th ...

, but Lordstown CEO Burns was confident the suspension and software being developed for the Endurance would overcome these challenges. The final weight of the hub motors used on the production Endurance is each.

Chassis

At the rear, the Endurance uses a

beam axle A beam axle, rigid axle or solid axle is a dependent suspension design in which a set of wheels is connected laterally by a single beam or shaft. Beam axles were once commonly used at the rear wheels of a vehicle, but historically they have als ...

leaf spring A leaf spring is a simple form of spring commonly used for the suspension in wheeled vehicles. Originally called a ''laminated'' or ''carriage spring'', and sometimes referred to as a semi-elliptical spring, elliptical spring, or cart spring, it ...

Performance

The estimated top speed is and Lordstown claims the production Endurance can accelerate from 0 to in 6.3 seconds.

References

{{reflist Electric trucks Pickup trucks Cars introduced in 2020 First car made by manufacturer