Moving on to Ohio, Foxconn now plans to build the Endurance in a joint partnership with Lordstown. Then-President Trump helped broker the Foxconn folly with the Wisconsin GOP, shoveled dirt at a groundbreaking, and trumpeted this midwest Potemkin Village as “the eighth wonder of the world.” Going full circle, Trump’s public browbeating of General Motors helped lay the ground for Lordstown Motors. It’s better known as Foxconn, assembler of the iPhone, last seen bamboozling Wisconsin on an epic scale with phony promises of a $10 billion LCD factory and American jobs. And Lordstown was recently forced to sell its most valuable asset for a nearly $260 million lifeline: Its former General Motors factory in Ohio, to Taiwan’s Hon Hai Technology Group. Yet since it went public in a SPAC merger, the company burned through about $700 million. The ascension of Hightower to CEO-a veteran executive engineer of Ford, GM, and BMW, and the first African-American automaking chief in more than a century-at least put an experienced automaker in charge. Here in 2022, the questions still hover like gnats around a company that appeared a Hail Mary play from the start, and has become a fumbled football of unmet promises, financial struggles and shenanigans, and revolving-door management. But any illusion quickly dissolves, as it has from the beginning, when Lordstown’s founders and political enablers first began to play on the hopes and dreams of struggling workers and residents of Ohio’s Mahoning Valley. This Michigan spin in a pre-production Endurance, together with a brave face shown by company executives-including newly appointed CEO Edward Hightower - forces me to at least reconsider Lordstown, Ohio’s troubled EV start-up. The Lordstown Endurance Doesn't Have What It Takes MEGAN JELINGER/GettyĪ drive of the Lordstown Endurance in best experienced in a vacuum: A space with no EV rivals, no market reality to intrude on the steady hum of four utterly pointless wheel hub motors.
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