Meet the Lordstown Endurance, a new $52,500 electric work truck

• 

  On June 25, Lordstown Motors revealed the Lordstown Endurance, a new battery electric truck. [credit: Lordstown Motors ]

Good news, everyone: the battery electric vehicle market is about to get more crowded. On Thursday, Lordstown Motors unveils the Lordstown Endurance, a new BEV truck aimed at the fleet market. The $52,500 truck goes into production next year in Lordstown, Ohio, at a former General Motors factory, and unlike forthcoming BEV pickups from Tesla and Rivian, this one is aimed squarely at the commercial and fleet market.

If news about a US-made electric pickup geared toward the work truck market sounds familiar to you, that's understandable. In 2018, we took a look at the Workhorse W-15, a carbon-fiber plug-in hybrid EV work truck that was designed in Ohio. But Workhorse ran into funding problems and decided to shelve the W-15. It also let go of its CEO, Steve Burns, who licensed some of the W-15 technology for a new project. That new project was Lordstown Motors, named for the town in Ohio where its factory is located. It's a factory that built Chevrolet Cruzes until it was closed last year in a widely criticized cost-cutting exercise by General Motors. (GM and LG Chem have also chosen Lordstown as the site of a new battery gigafactory.)

It looks like a normal truck

The first thing you notice about the Endurance is that it looks like it was styled to blend in on an American worksite, not to stand out on the surface of Mars. "We really tried to strike a balance on the looks, since we cater to fleets," Burns told me when we spoke by phone on Wednesday. "We thought, let's keep the vehicle so that at least it's a pickup truck. It has a bed and a cab and a hood, but let's make sure-because a lot of fleets are very proud that they are putting their names on the side of an electric vehicle-let's make sure folks can point to that and say, 'Oh, that's one of those electrics,'" he told me.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments