From microcar fans to restorers of classic American muscle to the ’80s crowd preserving everyday family cars, it genuinely takes all kinds to save and enjoy automotive history. In the future, will we see collectors of modern EV oddities? I reckon we will, and they’ll be hunting for rides like this. A Lordstown Endurance electric pickup truck is up for sale on Facebook Marketplace, and if you ever wanted to own a piece of the EV startup bubble, this is as good a chance as any.
Through the EV boom of the late 2010s and early 2020s, Lordstown is one of the more notable stories of collapse. It lasted just five years from its founding to filing for Chapter 11, and while it has since emerged from bankruptcy, production hasn’t resumed. However, in that brief half-decade window, the company did make a handful of electric pickup trucks for customers, and they stand as monuments of an interesting moment in automotive history.
The story starts in 2018, when former Workhouse Group CEO Steve Burns decided to start a new electric vehicle company. One year later, it had purchased GM’s old Lordstown Assembly plant in Ohio and paid to license the Workhorse W-15 pickup truck as a starting point for its own design, with the deal seeing Workhorse gain a 15 percent equity stake in Lordstown. If you haven’t heard of the W-15, don’t worry, this 2017 prototype was fairly obscure. It was a range-extender hybrid like a BMW i3, with a three-cylinder engine, a 40 kWh net capacity battery pack, and dual electric motors. In a way, the W-15 predicted the future of electrified pickup trucks like the incoming Scout Terra and the Ram Ramcharger, but the vibe of the time was all-electric, so Lordstown set out re-engineering it to be a battery-only machine.
Clearly, the re-engineering was done in record time as the Lordstown Endurance electric truck made its public debut in 2020 and testing soon after, aligning nicely with Lordstown going public through every EV startup’s favorite method, the Special Purpose Acquisition Company, or SPAC for short. Basically, an acquisition company raised capital on the stock market, then reverse-merged with Lordstown as an easier way of going public. While SPACs were fast, cutting corners in going public often yielded questionable results.
Speaking of questionable results, it didn’t take long for snags in testing to appear, as one Endurance pickup prototype caught fire in January of 2021. In a way, that was a sign of things to come, as 2021 didn’t go smoothly for the firm. From accusations of inflated pre-order numbers to an SEC filing that revealed the cash on hand wouldn’t be enough for full-scale production, things were starting to look not-so-certain for the startup. Understandably, later in 2021, Lordstown sought to raise capital in any way possible, including selling the proverbial shirts off their backs. The plant the company was named after got sold to Foxconn, with the plan then being to contract Foxconn as a manufacturer of the Endurance pickup truck alongside the ill-fated Fisker Pear. However, even that wasn’t enough, so Lordstown asked Foxconn for an additional $170 million investment later that year. Unfortunately, the story goes that Foxconn didn’t follow through, and by mid-2023, Lordstown Motors had declared bankruptcy with only a small number of trucks making it into public hands. This is one of them.
Yes, here’s a 2023 Lordstown Endurance up for sale in Michigan on Facebook Marketplace, and as you’d expect, it’s basically showroom fresh. With a claimed 300 miles on the clock, its paint and trim gleam, its interior looks brand new, and it comes with both Level 1 and Level 2 charging equipment. What’s more, the Endurance is a rather interesting truck because it did things differently than every other electric truck on sale in America. Instead of a dual-motor setup with independent suspension at all four corners, the Lordstown Endurance featured hub motors that allowed for a solid rear axle riding on leaf springs.
Granted, while it was proof that the concept of hub motors could work, there’s some weirdness to the EPA numbers. Despite featuring a 109 kWh battery pack, this truck was only rated for 174 miles of range. That’s a weird one, considering the EPA rating also features figures of 48 MPGe and 48 kWh/100mi, figures that just don’t line up, considering MPGe is how many miles an EV can travel on 37.7 kWh of electricity. I wrote a whole piece on this right before Lordstown, well, went bust, but as a collector’s item, these EPA figures likely don’t matter as much.
On the one hand, $32,000 is a lot of money for a vehicle with a questionable parts support network outside of the things re-used from other vehicles. On the other, unlike certain other vehicles from startups that fizzled out early, the Endurance is type-approved, meaning you can buy one, register one, and drive one on American roads. It’s an incredibly rare truck that you can actually do stuff with. This would be a perfect machine for someone like Aging Wheels on YouTube, or another person who specializes in unusual EVs.
Top graphic credit: Facebook Marketplace seller/Lucasfilm
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