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Lordstown Motors is doing all it can to stick to the rollout schedule for its battery-electric Endurance pickup. Last month, the startup invited a small group of media to its new production facility in Lordstown, Ohio, to poke around the truck’s internals. Those guests got to see videos of Lordstown Motors President and CEO Steve Burns driving the Endurance on a development track. The company’s released the vids to the public as part of an ongoing series documenting the truck’s progress, giving us a decent look at the undercarriage and the in-wheel hub motors that separate this particular EV from the competition. The first clip is a 12-second montage of a development mule romping through various spots on the track. The “Alpha” test vehicle is a camouflaged Chevrolet Silverado body over a Lordstown Motors chassis.
The second, 16-second video is a single shot of the hub motor that the company calls “In-Wheel Drive” as the Endurance traverses a muddy track. It looks, at the very least, counterintuitive to have electric motors hung at the end of beam axles with leaf springs, but Lordstown says it’s done its homework. Burns noted, “Over the past 10 years we’ve developed a high degree of confidence in our In-Wheel Drive System. The system has been tested through every imaginable environment and has proven to be extremely durable. Such was the case when I drove the Alpha body for the first time.”
The production truck is expected to employ four of those motors producing a total 600 horsepower and an as-yet-unknown amount of torque, good for a tow rating of 6,000 pounds. They’ll get their juice from a battery produced in-house, estimated to be between 70 and 80 kWh, enough to provide at least 200 miles of go.
The public debut had been planned for the now-canceled Detroit Auto Show, and market launch remains scheduled for late this year but will depend on how current affairs evolve. A company statement explained, “We are working to maintain our schedule, which is dependent upon the performance of our partners and suppliers, who we are working with each day to stay on course and limit the impact of COVID-19. We are continuing to monitor the situation and prioritizing the health and safety of our workers and community as we do.”
Whenever production lines start running, Lordstown apparently has thousands of pre-orders to fulfill. About 750 of those orders come from local Ohio enterprises, Clean Fuels Ohio and FirstEnergy, and 6,000 pre-orders have been lifted from the Workhorse Group based in Cincinnati. As the local Tribune Chronicle newspaper explained, the Endurance is a reworked, pure EV version of the Workhorse W-15 EREV pickup, and, “The agreement is part of a partnership between the companies that lets Lordstown Motors use Workhorse technology to produce the Endurance in exchange for Workhorse holding 10 percent of Lordstown Motors.”
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