Lordstown Motors seems all but finished, but it isn’t finished yet, and on Tuesday its president Rich Schmidt said it had “binding” orders and was good to go for the next two years. Except on Thursday, Lordstown said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it had no binding orders.
Thursday’s filing with the SEC comes two days after Schmidt’s remarks and three days after Lordstown’s CEO and CFO quit, in what has been a week of chaos. The company has insisted it will deliver its all-electric Endurance truck by September, but that is increasingly in doubt. Lordstown’s stock, which nosedived after Monday’s news before recovering a bit, is back down today as of this writing.
From Lordstown’s SEC filing on Thursday (emphasis mine):
We have entered into vehicle purchase agreements with additional specialty upfitting and fleet management companies as a component of that strategy. These vehicle purchase agreements establish the terms and conditions of potential future purchases and other cooperation and generally have the following terms:
·Term of 3 to 5 years;
·Designation of Lordstown Motors as a preferred supplier;
·Order procedures, including forecasting, confirmation, statusing, and cancellation procedures;
·Down payment terms, which are generally 5% down 90 days prior to the requested delivery date;
·Invoicing, delivery and payment terms; and
·Other customary terms, including warranties, indemnification, intellectual property use, insurance and confidentiality terms.
These vehicle purchase agreements generally include a projected buyer order schedule over the 3 to 5 year life of the agreement, and may be terminated by either party at will on 30 days’ notice. They do not commit the counterparties to purchase vehicles, but we believe that they provide us with a significant indicator of demand for the Endurance.
To clarify recent remarks by company executives at the Automotive Press Association online media event on June 15, although these vehicle purchase agreements provide us with a significant indicator of demand for the Endurance, these agreements do not represent binding purchase orders or other firm purchase commitments.
What Lordstown has, in real terms, is basically nothing. The company also said in the filing that its annual meeting, originally scheduled for Thursday, was postponed to August 19. The company also said it had hired a former GM guy named John Whitcomb as vice president of global commercial operations. Just another normal day at Lordstown Motors.