For The New Republic: The Bitter Conclusion of Trump’s Failed Flirtation With Electric Vehicles
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is incredible,” President Trump boasted in front of a gleaming white pickup parked on the South Lawn driveway in late September 2020. At a glance, the truck kind of resembled a Toyota Tacoma or a Ford F-150. Its unusual face gave it away—that, and the enormous copper-colored discs inside its wheels.
The truck was an electric Lordstown Endurance, built by start-up Lordstown Motors at a long-troubled former General Motors plant near Youngstown, Ohio. A year after GM closed that factory and laid off its workers, Trump, ever the salesman, was trying to sell a comeback story for Midwestern manufacturing driven by cutting-edge electric vehicle technology.
“Until this, nobody has actually done it, having the motors in each wheel—having motors in each wheel,” Trump repeated, exuding all the confidence of someone who learned how the truck worked five minutes before the cameras started rolling. “And they’re very well coordinated, and you can work them individually or whatever is necessary, by computer.”It is highly unlikely that Trump considers himself a great aficionado of wheel hub motors, the signature technology used in Lordstown’s truck. What mattered on that morning was that, at least in Trump’s mind, he was bringing thousands of jobs back to a crucial swing state just weeks before the election he’d ultimately lose.
But last week, Lordstown Motors announced it had filed for bankruptcy, less than three years after Trump’s truck show on the White House lawn. The company is embroiled in a bitter lawsuit with its technical partner and current factory owner, Taiwanese iPhone manufacturing giant Foxconn. Only a handful of trucks seem to have been delivered to customers. By May, Lordstown Motors was on its third round of recalls, even after coming off a lengthy production halt to fix quality issues. Headlines lately have depicted the automaker as a start-up on life support, not a lifeline for a region that needed it. The whole thing feels incredibly cynical and hollow in hindsight.
