The ousted founder of bankrupt electric vehicle startup Lordstown Motors has launched a new company called LandX Motors, which prominently features the same electric pickup truck he once promised would beat Tesla, Ford and General Motors to market.
Steve Burns, a self-described “serial entrepreneur,” bought most of the remaining assets of his former startup late last year as part of Lordstown’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, including a significant portion of its electric pickup trucks. on New location As for LandX Motors, he says this company will chart “the future of mobility,” and claims he will build a full range of vehicles on the platform that underpins what he has been calling Endurance. While LandX Motors doesn’t explicitly refer to the trucks as Endurance, a video on the website shows EV trucks bearing the Lordstown badge.
A person familiar with the company’s plans told TechCrunch that it’s less about the Endurance truck and more about the underlying platform, software, and engineering behind it. However, with former Lordstown trucks starring on the company’s website and video, it’s unclear how far this plan will develop.
What’s not made clear on the website is how Burns plans to solve some of the biggest problems Lordstown Motors never solved. Crucially, Lordstown Motors executives said in the months before filing for bankruptcy protection that the cost of building the Endurance far exceeded its $60,000 retail price. The company also did not say where or how it plans to build the trucks. A LandX Motors spokesperson responded to an email, but did not provide any additional information and declined to answer questions.
This isn’t the first time Burns has started a new electric vehicle company tied to an old one. He founded Lordstown Motors in 2019 after leaving a different struggling EV company, Workhorse. He struck a deal with that company to license designs for a pickup truck project that came to be called the Endurance.
He then purchased a shuttered General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, and took Lordstown Motors public in a merger with a special purpose acquisition company in 2020.
By early 2021, Lordstown Motors was under federal investigation for allegedly misleading investors during the merger about the number of orders it had for the Endurance. Burns and then-CFO Julio Rodriguez resigned after the company’s internal investigation found they had made factually misleading statements.
The startup struggled and eventually sold the factory to iPhone maker Foxconn. The Taiwanese electronics giant began manufacturing Endurance trucks in late 2022, but was quickly recalled, and both companies stopped. It was his downfall. The Lordstown company filed for bankruptcy protection in June 2023. The SEC recently said in court filings that it is seeking $45 million from the company for “violations of federal securities laws.”
I made burns Tens of millions of dollars from the sale of Lordstown stock During all this. Late last year, he purchased the Lordstown assets for about $10 million through a holding company called LAS Capital, which has investments in three other startups.
The new startup is a reunion even outside of the truck. Of the 16 employees who listed LandX Motors as their employer on LinkedIn, 13 worked at Lordstown Motors. Duane Hughes, the CEO who replaced Burns at Workhorse in 2019 (and was replaced in 2021 amid that startup’s struggles), is in the papers filed with the state of Michigan. (Julio Rodriguez is now also CFO of LAS Capital.)
“I believed then, and I believe even more today, in what we built in Lordstown. That’s why I bought back the assets and rehired most of the engineering team.” Autoweek said in December.