The ousted founder of bankrupt EV startup Lordstown Motors has launched a new company called LandX Motors that prominently features the same electric truck he once promised would beat Tesla, Ford and General Motors to market.
Steve Burns, a self-described “serial entrepreneur,” bought most of his former startup’s remaining assets late last year as part of Lordstown’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, including a large portion of its electric trucks. On a new website for LandX Motors, he says this company will design “the future of mobility” and claims to build an entire line of vehicles on the platform that underpins what was formerly called Endurance. While LandX Motors doesn’t specifically refer to the trucks as Endurance, a video on the website shows Lordstown-badged EV trucks.
A person familiar with the company’s plans told TechCrunch that it’s not so much about the Endurance truck, but the underlying platform, software and engineering behind it. However, with ex-Lordstown trucks taking center stage on the company’s website and video, it’s unclear how developed this plan is.
What isn’t made clear on the website is how Burns plans to solve some of the biggest problems that Lordstown Motors never solved. Crucially, Lordstown Motors executives said in the months before the bankruptcy filing that the Endurance’s manufacturing costs far exceeded its $60,000 retail price. The company also isn’t saying where or how it plans to build the trucks. A representative for LandX Motors responded to an email but did not provide further information and declined to answer questions.
It’s not the first time Burns has started a new electric vehicle company with ties to an old one. He founded Lordstown Motors in 2019 after leaving a different electric vehicle startup, Workhorse. He made a deal with this company to license the designs for a truck project that became the Endurance.
It then bought a shuttered GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio, and took Lordstown Motors public in a merger with a special purpose vehicle in 2020.
In early 2021, Lordstown Motors was under federal investigation for misleading investors during the merger process about how many orders it had secured for the Endurance. Burns and then-CFO Julio Rodriguez resigned after the company’s internal investigation found that they had in fact made misleading statements.
The startup struggled and eventually sold the factory to iPhone maker Foxconn. The Taiwanese electronics giant began building Endurance trucks in late 2022, but both companies quickly recalled had a fall. Lordstown filed for bankruptcy in June 2023. The Securities and Exchange Commission recently said in court filings that it is seeking $45 million from the company for “violations of federal securities laws.”
Burns occurred tens of millions of dollars by selling shares of Lordstown during all of this. Late last year, it bought Lordstown’s 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 beyond the truck. Of the 16 employees who list LandX Motors as their employer on LinkedIn, 13 of them worked at Lordstown Motors. Duane Hughes, the executive who replaced Burns at Workhorse in 2019 (and was replaced in 2021 amid the startup’s own struggles), is in the documents filed with the state of Michigan. (Julio Rodriguez is also now the CFO of LAS Capital.)
“I believed then, and believe even more today, in what we built in Lordstown. So I bought back the assets and rehired most of the engineering team,” Burns he told Autoweek in December.
