Lordstown Motors Falls Apart

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Lordstown Motors Falls Apart

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The bumbling management of electric vehicle (EV) company Lordstown Motors bumbled one last time. The failed company filed for Chapter 11 and accused China’s Foxconn of failing to provide promised financing. The money would not have mattered. Lordstown fell apart a year ago. (These are the 13 biggest electric vehicle business failures in American history.)
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Lordstown was supposed to get $170 million from Foxconn. Foxconn already had invested $52 million and owned a stake in the electric truck maker of just over 8%. That investment is probably worth zero today.
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Lordstown was a $50 stock 11 months ago. It dropped below $3 recently. The Chapter 11 announcement pushed it closer to $1.50. A few unstable investors think the company will milk something out of Foxconn. It is a long shot, and these people will lose their money.
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In February, Lordstown had a major recall and said its trucks had quality problems. This blow was followed by its quarterly earnings announcement. The company had revenue of $194,000 and lost $102 million. It lost $81 million in the same quarter the year before.
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Ironically, Lordstown’s Endurance truck was named the Truck of the Year. It was priced too high at $65,000. Drivers could buy the Ford F-150 Lightning for the same amount and, with that, the power of Ford’s dealerships, design, warranties and brand.

Lordstown has moved down the path that most small EV companies will. It needed to be bigger, needed too large an investment and had virtually no brand equity.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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