The ousted founding father of bankrupt EV startup Lordstown Motors has launched a brand new firm referred to as LandX Motors, that prominently shows the identical electrical pickup truck he as soon as promised would beat Tesla, Ford and Basic Motors to market.
Steve Burns, a self-described “serial entrepreneur,” purchased a lot of the remaining property of his former startup late final 12 months as a part of the Lordstown’s Chapter 11 chapter proceedings, together with a big chunk of its electrical pickup vans. On a brand new web site for LandX Motors, he says this firm will chart “the way forward for mobility,” and claims he’ll construct a complete lineup of autos on the platform that underpins what was once referred to as the Endurance. Whereas LandX Motors doesn’t explicitly check with the vans because the Endurance, a video on the web site reveals EV vans which have the Lordstown badge.
An individual accustomed to the corporate’s plans instructed TechCrunch that it’s not a lot in regards to the Endurance truck, however the underlying platform, software program and engineering behind it. Nonetheless, with the previous Lordstown vans taking part in a starring position on firm’s web site and video, it’s unclear simply how developed this plan is.
What’s not made clear on the web site is how Burns plans to crack a few of the greatest issues that Lordstown Motors by no means solved. Crucially, Lordstown Motors executives mentioned within the months earlier than submitting for chapter safety that the price to construct the Endurance far exceeded the $60,000 retail worth. The corporate additionally doesn’t say the place, or how, it plans to construct the vans. A LandX Motors spokesperson responded to an electronic mail, however didn’t present any additional info and declined to reply questions.
This isn’t the primary time that Burns has began a brand new electrical automobile firm with ties to an outdated one. He based Lordstown Motors in 2019 after leaving a unique struggling EV startup, Workhorse. He struck a cope with that firm to license the designs for a pickup truck venture that turned the Endurance.
He then bought a shuttered GM manufacturing facility in Lordstown, Ohio, and took Lordstown Motors public in a merger with a particular function acquisition firm in 2020.
By early 2021, Lordstown Motors was underneath federal investigation for deceptive buyers throughout the merger course of about what number of orders it had secured for the Endurance. Burns and then-chief monetary officer Julio Rodriguez resigned after the corporate’s personal inside probe decided that they’d, in actual fact, made deceptive statements.
The startup struggled and finally offered the manufacturing facility to iPhone maker Foxconn. The Taiwanese electronics large began constructing Endurance vans in late 2022, however they have been rapidly recalled, and the 2 firms had a falling out. Lordstown filed for chapter safety in June 2023. The Securities and Trade Fee lately mentioned in courtroom filings that it’s looking for $45 million from the corporate for “violations of federal securities legal guidelines.”
Burns made tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} promoting Lordstown inventory throughout all of this. Late final 12 months, he bought the Lordstown property for about $10 million by way of a holding firm referred to as LAS Capital, which has investments in three different startups.
The brand new startup is a reunion even past the truck. Of the 16 workers who record LandX Motors as their employer on LinkedIn, 13 of them used to work at Lordstown Motors. Duane Hughes, the chief who changed Burns at Workhorse in 2019 (and was changed in 2021 amid that startup’s personal struggles), is on the paperwork filed with the state of Michigan. (Julio Rodriguez can also be now the chief monetary officer of LAS Capital.)
“I believed then, and I imagine much more right this moment, in what we constructed at Lordstown. That’s why I purchased again the property and rehired a lot of the engineering group,” Burns instructed Autoweek in December.