2023 Lordstown Endurance Electric Pickup Is Up and Running

The 2023 Lordstown Endurance is likely the electric pickup you’ve never heard of. Unveiled in June 2020 by a startup Ohio automaker, it’s a full-size truck with 8000 pounds of towing capacity and a target of 200 miles of range. It’s aimed solely at fleet buyers whose trucks must earn their keep and work for a living.

While 200 miles wouldn’t cut it for personal-use vehicles, hard-nosed fleet managers know how far each of their trucks travels daily—and whether 200 miles of range (minus allowances for highway use, winter temperatures, and towing) will suffice. The Endurance starts at $65,060.

Still, Lordstown faces some very steep odds. For our first drive of the Endurance pickup, there were two questions: Is the truck fit for purpose? And does the company have a hope of success?

Driving Early-Production Trucks

Over two days, we spent about 90 minutes total with two separate Endurance pickups—VINs 005 and 006, it turned out. They differed slightly and were still receiving final tweaks, said Darren Post, Lordstown’s vice president of engineering. He rode shotgun on routes encompassing suburban traffic, country roads, and freeway driving outside Ann Arbor, Michigan.

From the outside, the Endurance is an upright pickup with a body-color shield where the grille would be, with the charge port in its center behind the Lordstown logo. There’s a frunk that contains almost 10 cubic feet of storage. Design flourishes are few but include serrated black accent strips that break up the flat side panels and long, thin horizontal headlights and taillights that wrap around the body corners. The 20-inch wheels wear tires with tall sidewalls; no high-fashion 23-inch rims here.

Inside, the truck is clearly a fleet vehicle, with an overall design theme of “basic.” Upholstery is black cloth, relieved by white stitching; door upholstery is gray vinyl. The seats slide manually, and this must be one of the last new vehicles without a telescoping steering column. The front seats are divided by a wide, deep console bin, and the flat-floored cabin easily accommodates four six-foot adults through wide-opening doors. The 66.8-inch-long bed has a carbon-fiber liner, with “Lordstown” stamped into the tailgate section.

Behind the wheel, the rectangular digital instrument cluster and center touchscreen have big, clear, easy-to-read graphics. The trucks we drove lacked both navigation and smartphone mirroring via Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. Those are “on the list,” Post said.

The four motors’ horsepower and torque outputs are not yet finalized, but the company is estimating 440 horses from those motors, one at each wheel. In its Normal mode, the truck accelerates swiftly but without the kidney punch of a GMC Hummer EV or a Tesla. Speed is capped at 75 mph—a challenge when you’re trying to navigate fast, aggressive Detroit-area freeway traffic. One-pedal driving is the default mode, though it can be switched off, and Lordstown has tuned its regenerative braking well. Drivers can select a Sport mode too, which gives more abrupt accelerator response and aggressive regen with transitions that felt much jerkier. We doubt Sport mode will be important to companies who want their drivers to get the most miles out of fleet trucks using the least electricity.

Lordstown advertises a turning diameter of 47.0 feet—one foot better than the F-150 Lightning—and indeed, the truck turns sharply. That’s not tight enough for a U-turn in two lanes, but for a full-size pickup, it feels more maneuverable than competitors with gasoline engines. The steel structure has an aluminum hood, fenders, doors, and tailgate, with a claimed curb weight of 6450 pounds.

Four Hub Motors

This is a big, tall vehicle, but with a 109.0-kWh battery pack located under the cabin, the Endurance handles better than its engine-equipped counterparts—with one exception. Unlike the two other electric pickups now on sale—the Lightning and the Rivian R1T—it uses a solid rear axle on leaf springs. It’s simple, cheap to maintain, and should reassure set-in-their-ways fleet mechanics, but it produced a lot of side-to-side jiggle, or head toss, on certain road surfaces.

That may be due to the all-wheel-drive truck’s unusual weight distribution. Most EVs are close to 50-50 front to rear, as this one is. But rather than two motors, one each between the front and the rear wheels, the Endurance uses four liquid-cooled hub motors. Each weighs 150 pounds, Post said. Added to the weight of the wheels and tires they propel, that’s likely more unsprung weight than any other light-duty vehicle on the road.

Lordstown’s chassis engineers have done their job, so it’s not immediately evident how much mass is moving up and down under each corner. But without a differential, the solid rear axle is really just a tube on springs with all its weight at the very ends—hence, we suspect, the jiggle.

Between them, the two early-production trucks had a variety of issues still to be addressed. Each had a different mix of wind noise, creaks behind the dash, and flimsy mirror mountings. The Endurance is also still in its Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) certification phase, and Lordstown says it’s shooting for 5-star safety ratings from the NHTSA.

It clearly needs some final tweaks, but based on our limited driving, we’d say the Lordstown Endurance is approaching readiness for fleet-truck use. That presumes the assembly quality is high and the trucks hold up in the hands of early customers. Most important, it also assumes Lordstown can convince conservative, risk-averse fleet buyers they should not only buy EV pickup trucks but do so from a startup company.

Better-Known Competitors Jump Out Ahead

By this point, most Americans likely have some awareness of the Ford F-150 Lightning. Ford’s EV pickup gets up to 320 miles of range, can provide up to three days of backup power for your home (when properly equipped), and leaps to 60 mph in 4.0 seconds. Ford has both work-truck and high-end consumer versions—and has received reservations for more than 200,000 Lightnings altogether.

The Rivian R1T electric pickup came from a startup that stayed stealthy for nine years and then stole the limelight at the 2018 Los Angeles Auto Show. It’s a size smaller than the Lightning and Endurance, a mid-size pickup heavy on built-in technology and luxury. Amazon has invested more than $2 billion into Rivian, which will build 100,000 electric delivery vans for it over five years.

Lordstown has a less salutary history. Founded in 2018, it has been through three CEOs, an expose by short-seller Hindenburg Research, and an SEC investigation. Lordstown’s tumultuous five years are summarized here. In May, it completed the sale of its Ohio factory (one-time home to the Chevy Vega) to Taiwanese contract assembler Foxconn, which will build the Endurance at the site alongside its own Foxtron-branded electric vehicles.

The Foxconn deal gives Lordstown a bit more viability. Lordstown executives have been pitching their pickup to a variety of fleet operators, to learn which industries or niches may be best suited to the truck’s capabilities.

We’ll watch over the next few months to see whether Lordstown announces major fleet purchase agreements for Endurance pickup trucks. Lordstown hopes to announce the first vehicle deliveries before the end of this year—more than a year later than planned. It’s been a tough road bringing the once-novel idea of a battery-powered pickup to market. Lordstown has now shown it can make a viable truck. We’ll see whether it can make a viable business.

Source: www.caranddriver.com