Lordstown Motors (RIDE) Endurance EV pickup sales began in Q4, with the company selling not one, not two, but three vehicles in the fourth quarter of 2022. Although Lordstown beat the Tesla Cybertruck to market, the EV startup faces more financial woes with widening losses in Q4 and an ongoing production halt.
Meanwhile, Lordstown says it’s progressing on a new EV program with Foxconn.
Endurance EV truck sales begin in Q4
With the first three Endurance sales under its belt, Lordstown has crossed an important milestone, but the EV maker still has a long road ahead of it.
Founded in 2018, Lordstown has faced a series of hurdles to get to this point. After nearly running out of money several times, and the company’s CEO and CFO abruptly resigned in 2021, the fate of the Endurance electric pickup was up in the air.
Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn threw the company a life raft, buying its Ohio plant later that year. Foxconn has stepped in multiple times since to help the young EV maker since then.
After announcing it would need at least $50 to $75 million last August to ramp Endurance EV production and continue operations, Foxconn invested another $70 million to revamp the program.
Despite the cash injections, Lordstown is still facing issues getting its electric truck into customers’ hands. The company halted Endurance vehicle production last month amid a voluntary recall after finally beginning Endurance pickup sales in the fourth quarter.
On its Q4 earnings Monday, Lordstown said it’s still working to resolve the issue, with additional updates expected soon.
Lordstown Endurance electric truck (Source: Lordstown)
Lordstown Q4 2022 earnings highlights
Although Lordstown said the first batch of 500 Endurance EV trucks was leaving its Ohio plant in November, the company claims 40 of them have been completed or are in process, selling three EVs in Q4 and a total of six through February 2023.
Lordstown also said, “e now have line of sight to the resolution of the issues” and expect to announce in the “coming weeks” when it will resume production and EV deliveries.
Meanwhile, Foxconn continued throwing money at the EV startup, investing up to another $170 million with an initial $52 million funded.
Revenue reached $194,000 in Q4, while Lordstown’s net loss rose to $102 million. Lordstown ended the year with $221.7 million in cash and equivalents. The company expects to end the first quarter with $150 million to $170 million in funds, not including additional investments from Foxconn.
Of the $50 million Foxconn investment, $30 million is being put toward a new EV program, including an electric vehicle and platform.
Lordstown said, “the next platform and vehicle program are key” to the company’s long-term strategy and are becoming more of a focus.
Lordstown (RIDE) stock is down today as investors had hoped to hear better news on the production front.
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Tesla has announced that it produced its one millionth Powerwall. An impressive milestone that is, unfortunately, overshadowed by some questionable math.
Powerwall is by far the most popular home battery pack system, especially in North America.
It has popularized residential energy storage and made it now ubiquitous with new rooftop solar energy installations in the US.
Tesla managed to significantly ramp up production and installations in the last few years.
Now, Tesla has announced that it has built its one millionth Powerwall:
Here are the timelines of Tesla’s milestones regarding the deployments and production of the Powerwall:
It took Tesla roughly two years to go from 500,000 to 1 million Powerwalls despite claiming to be scalable of producing over 300,000 units per year since 2023 and 700,000 per year since 2024.
We recently noted that Powerwall is not only a highly popular home battery pack, but it is also a best-selling solar inverter, as the latest version, Powerwall 3, includes an inverter.
Electrek’s Take
Kudos to everyone involved in achieving this milestone. It is impressive, and I think Powerwall is a great product.
It’s just sad that it is hard to trust Tesla these days, and the math doesn’t add up here, as explained in this article.
I might be reading too much into this, but it’s my job to track Tesla closely, and therefore, I do note those inconsistencies.
It will be interesting to see what happens with the Powerwall program in the coming months and years with the tariff situation as the product currently relies on battery cells imported from China.
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Tesla is being forced to remove 64 Superchargers at stations along the New Jersey Turnpike as the local authorities have decided to go with another provider.
Elon Musk claimed corruption without any evidence.
The New Jersey Turnpike is a system of controlled-access toll roads that consists of a 100-mile section of important New Jersey highways.
The agreement has now expired, and instead of renewing it, the authority decided to give an exclusive agreement to Applegreen, which already operates in all service areas on the turnpike.
Tesla issued a statement saying that it is disappointed with the situation, but that it has prepared for this by building new stations off the turnpike for the last few years:
The New Jersey Turnpike Authority (“NJTA”) has chosen a sole third-party charging provider to serve the New Jersey Turnpike and is not allowing us to co-locate. As a result, NJTA requested 64 existing Supercharger stalls on the New Jersey Turnpike to not be renewed and be decommissioned. We have been preparing for 3 years for this potential outcome by building 116 stalls off the New Jersey Turnpike, ensuring no interruption for our customers. The map below outlines the existing replacement Superchargers, and Trip Planner will adjust automatically.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk went a step further and called it “corruption” without any evidence.
The automaker’s agreement with NJTA expired, and they decided to go with a sole provider. Applegreen will reportedly deploy chargers at all 21 turnpike service stops.
Here are Tesla’s replacement Superchargers off the turnpike:
Electrek’s Take
I don’t like the decision from the Turnpike authorities. More chargers are better than fewer chargers. However, I also don’t like Musk calling everything he doesn’t like fraud or corruption.
While I agree with Tesla that it is unreasonable to force them to remove the stations, it appears to be an oversight on Tesla’s part not to have included stipulations in their agreement to prevent such a scenario from happening in the first place.
Who signs a deal to deploy millions of dollars worth of charging equipment with only the right to operate them there for 5 years?
It looks like Tesla knew this was coming since it specifically built several new Supercharger stations off the turnpike to prepare for this.
On the other hand, I don’t like the Turnpike Authority using the term “universal charger” as if this is a positive for Applegreen. They are going to use CCS, and everyone is moving to NACS in North America.
Yes, for a while, only Tesla owners will have to use adapters, but that will soon change and the current NACS Supercharger will be even more useful.
At the end of the day, the stations are already there. Let them operate them.
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ZQUIP is working hard to bring more smart, efficient, modular power solutions to commercial job sites everywhere – and at the core of their vision for the future is battery-swap technology. You can see just how easy it is make that happen here.
MOOG Construction’s energy skunkworks ZQUIP made headlines last year by bringing the cordless power tool battery model to the world of industrial-grade heavy equipment.
“The 700V ZQUIP Energy Modules are at the core of this innovation, said Chris LaFleur, managing director for QUIP. “ZQUIP modules are interchangeable across any machine we convert regardless of size, type, or manufacturer, and will enable a level of serviceability, runtime, and value that is far greater than current battery solutions.”
ZQUIP generator prototype on Caterpillar excavator; via ZQUIP.
Most machines on most sites sit idle most of the time, but converting all those machines to battery electric power means that megawatts of battery capacity are being wasted. By utilizing swappable batteries, job sites can do what technicians and contractors have been doing for years with power tools: quickly get the energy they need to the tool they need when they need it, without the need to have a dedicated battery for every tool.
If you need to be able to run the machine non-stop and don’t have a reliable way to recharge your batteries quickly enough, a 140 kW diesel generator is built into a package the same size and shape as the batteries. In fact, if you look closely at the CASE excavator below (on the right), the “battery” on the right is, in fact, a diesel Energy Module.
The demo video, below, shows a pair of CASE-based electric excavators – one wheeled, one tracked – operating on ZQUIP’s Energy Modules. It takes less than two minutes to remove one battery, and presumably about the same time to swap another one in, for a 5 (ish) minute swap.
Even if you call it ten, by eliminating the need to get the entire machine up and out for charging (or for service, if there’s an issue with the battery/controllers), the ZQUIP battery swap construction equipment solution seems like a good one.
ZQUIP HDEV battery swap
SOURCE | IMAGES: ZQUIP.
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