The founder of Lordstown Motors is launching a new EV startup with trucks that we’ve seen before

The ousted founder of bankrupt EV company Lordstown Motors has launched a new company called LandX Motors, which is clearly showing the same electric vehicle 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 case, including most of his electric pickup trucks. Turn on new website for LandX Motors, he says the company will chart the “future of mobility,” and he claims it will build an entire line of vehicles on the platform that underpins the so-called Endurance. Although LandX Motors doesn’t explicitly refer to the truck as the Endurance, a video on the website shows the EV trucks bearing the Lordstown badge.

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. Still, with vintage Lordstown trucks playing the starring role on the company’s website and video, it’s unclear how the plan is designed.

What hasn’t been made clear on the website is how Burns plans to solve the other big problems that Lordstown Motors has never solved. More importantly, Lordstown Motors executives said in the months before filing for bankruptcy protection that the cost of building the Endurance exceeded the retail price by $60,000. The company also isn’t saying where, or how, it plans to build the trucks. A spokesperson for LandX Motors responded to an email, but did not provide any further details and declined to answer questions.

This isn’t the first time Burns has started a new electric car company with ties to an old one. He founded Lordstown Motors in 2019 after leaving a separate EV startup, Workhorse. He made an agreement with the company to license the designs of the cargo truck project that became the Endurance.

He then bought the shuttered GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio, and took Lordstown Motors public in a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company in 2020.

As of early 2021, Lordstown Motors was under federal investigation for misleading investors during the merger process about how many orders it had received for Endurance. Burns and then-chief financial officer Julio Rodriguez resigned after the company’s internal investigation found that they had made misleading statements.

The startup struggled and eventually sold the factory to iPhone maker Foxconn. The Taiwanese electronics giant started building Endurance trucks in late 2022, but they were quickly recalled, by the two companies. had to fall out. Lordstown filed for bankruptcy protection in June 2023. The Securities and Exchange Commission recently said in a court filing that it is seeking $45 million from the company for “violations of federal securities laws.”

Burns done tens of millions of dollars to sell shares of Lordstown during all this. Late last year, he bought the Lordstown property for about $10 million through a company called LAS Capital, which has investments in three other businesses.

The new startup is an alliance even more than a truck. Of the 16 employees who list LandX Motors as their employer on LinkedIn, 13 of them previously worked at Lordstown Motors. Duane Hughes, the executive who replaced Burns at Workhorse in 2019 (and was replaced in 2021 amid initial problems), is on the paper filed by the state of Michigan. (Julio Rodriguez is also now the chief financial officer 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 property and rehired a lot of the engineering team,” Burns said. he told Autoweek in December.