LORDSTOWN, Ohio — While most automakers deal with bringing back furloughed workers and slowly ramping up production again, Lordstown Motors Corporation has had to do little of that. The electric truck manufacturer that announced plans last year to purchase the sprawling Lordstown Assembly Plant from General Motors is still in the "knowing all employees by name" category with around 70 workers.
"Right now it's all engineering," said Lordstown Motors CEO Steve Burns. "So we have engineers at the shop, at the plant retooling it getting ready to reconfigure different parts." The big hire, the first wave of several hundred, will come at some point next year when full production begins on the Endurance, a fully electric pickup truck.
"We had originally indicated that would be 400 folks but we're upping that to 600 because we've added two lines internally here where we're going to make our own battery packs and our own hub motors, electric motors," Burns told News 5. "So 600 initially. I've been in the last few days speaking of what's the big picture? Well the big picture is to fill this place to capacity and you know it used to make over 400,000 Cruzes a year; our vehicle we've designed to be a lot simpler than that so we feel we can crank 600,000 vehicles out of this facility if we're blessed enough to have that kind of demand."
The original plan was to reveal the Endurance at the Detroit Auto Show in June, but the cancellation of the show forced Lordstown to alter those plans.
"We're going to do that probably here at the factory, that's going to happen in June and then in December — we're still going to have our 30 beta vehicles," Burns said. "They are essentially the finished product, but the ones that are then used for crash testing and other testing."
How that impacts the start of production next year is unclear, Burns said, adding, "but those two things are still on track and those are important milestones."
Regardless of when they start, Burns said they still are shooting for 20,000 trucks in 2021.
"Yep, we still want to squeeze that in even though we're going to have to compress the timeline there, that's still the goal for 2021," he said.
Beyond those numbers surrounding the production of the Endurance, Lordstown Motors is still in the running to land a $6.3 billion contract to produce an electric delivery vehicle for the U.S. Postal Service. An announcement was supposed to come last year, then delayed to early this year and again to this summer because of the coronavirus crisis.
"I can't discuss that at all other than we're, the same as everybody else, crossing our fingers," Burns said.
