Lordstown Motors Invites Investors and Analysts to Its Factory

“All of this enables us to bring this truck to market with less capital,” said Ian Upton, Lordstown’s director of production control.

But on this day only a handful of robots were shown handling and welding steel parts together.

Just one of the giant presses was operating, and in a demonstration it stamped just a single piece of sheet metal. Two engineers fed the sheet into the press, a task usually handled by automated machinery.

At one station, Lordstown showed the body of a truck being mated to a chassis, but the tooling to add the bed and front end were not yet in place. Nearby workers were adding finishing touches onto four truck beds by hand.

In an area the size of a football field, where wheel-hub motors are to be assembled, the floor was freshly painted but empty of machinery. The equipment is due to arrive in August, company officials said, just a month before production is to start. Company officials said they were confident it could be set up and pass quality tests in that time.

In addition to four prototypes of its basic truck, the company showed a military-grade vehicle, with three rows of seats, meant to suggest a potential area of business.

Since its high-profile inception, the company has run into a series of development difficulties. A prototype caught fire and burned up in a Detroit suburb in January, and another dropped out of a 280-mile off-road race in Baja California after just 40 miles.

Then Lordstown’s board acknowledged that some of the company’s statements about pre-orders were inaccurate, and the company said in a statement filed with securities regulators that it did not have enough money to start production and might not survive. That was followed by the resignations of its founder and chief executive, Steve Burns, and its chief financial officer, Julio Rodriguez.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/21/business/lordstown-motors-factory.html