Electric Vehicle News

Lordstown announces battery supplier for Endurance pickup, plans to produce electric van in 2022

Lordstown Motors has released an update on its business plans that includes several bits of news.

The Ohio-based EV builder confirmed that it has signed a multi-year battery supply agreement with LG Chem for the Endurance. The upcoming electric pickup will use 2170 cylindrical cells like the ones used in Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y.

The Endurance is scheduled to begin deliveries later this year—Lordstown has already started metal stamping for 57 beta prototypes, which will be used for crash testing and validation.

Like Tesla before it, Lordstown inherited an enormous auto factory that it will gradually grow into. Lordstown is currently renovating an 800,000-square-foot section of the 6.2-million-square-foot former GM plant.

Lordstown announced plans to unveil an electric van in June, and hopes to start production in the second half of 2022. The new van will use the company’s skateboard platform, which is designed to make it easy to create new vehicles by simply adding bodies to the chassis, which incorporates all the drivetrain components. The skateboard can even be driven on its own, as Lordstown confirmed in a recent test.

Lordstown’s Endurance is squarely aimed at fleet buyers, and the company has now been added to the US General Services Administration listing—a necessary step to be able to sell vehicles to government fleets. Reaching this milestone now seems all the more important in light of President Biden’s plan to electrify the federal government’s vehicle fleet.