Lordstown Motors Stock Slips as Dust Settles After Race
LORDSTOWN, Ohio – Lordstown Motors Corp.’s stock value dropped more than 8% Monday, a full trading day after the company’s much-touted all-electric pickup, the Endurance, failed to complete the SCORE International San Felipe 250 road race Saturday.
Indeed, the stock hit its 52-week low of $8.90 per share at one point in trading early Monday, hours before the company issued its first official press release explaining why it quit the 280-mile course after just 40 miles.
“We knew this was a grueling environment and would push us. We successfully navigated the extreme conditions over the first 40-mile leg of the race with all of our mechanicals meeting or exceeding our expectations,” Lordstown Motors CEO Steve Burns said in a video released Monday. “While we anticipated significantly higher energy demand from this environment – the reality of the terrain proved to be even more demanding,”
Simply put, the difficult off-road demands of the desert terrain in Baja, Mexico, were too much for the Endurance’s energy capacity.
When the race team stopped at the first charging station, data showed it was four times the power needed on normal road conditions at 200 feet of elevation. In pre-race estimates, the Lordstown Motors Endurance team assumed power use would be about three times the normal rates.
Burns said the team decided to stop racing at the 40-mile mark recharging station because the next leg of the race was more than 65 miles over mountainous terrain. Returning to the race was risky since the vehicle could stop on the difficult track, he said.
Instead, the race team took the Endurance on an additional 10 miles of off-course driving, Burns said.
“Our truck completed the stage fully intact, operationally sound and is now headed back home,” a statement from the company said.
Lordstown Motors has been teasing the San Felipe 250 for months, and recently stepped up the hype by releasing videos of the chassis being built ahead of the race, renderings of the race vehicle, and a photograph of the truck on the eve of the event.
Shares of Lordstown Motors, which trades under the ticker RIDE, closed at $9.20 per unit on Monday, a drop of 8.1% from its previous close on Friday.
At the close of trading Tuesday, the stock closed at $9.20 per change — the same closing price as Monday.
The company faces a handful of class-action lawsuits in the wake of a damaging short-sellers report released in March that alleges it fabricated pre-orders of the Endurance truck. In addition, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has requested documents related to Lordstown Motors’ pre-orders and its merger with DiamondPeak Holdings Corp., the special purpose acquisition company that took it public in October.
Pictured: The Lordstown Motors Endurance lined up with other vehicles ahead of the Score International San Felipe 250. (Image: Lordstown Motors Facebook)
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