Lordstown Motors Corp.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Lordstown Motors fourth quarter and full year 2020 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Carter Driscoll, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Josh. Good afternoon, and thank you to all for joining Lordstown Motors' fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings conference call. To supplement today's discussion, please go to our IRR website to view our press release and investor deck. Before we begin, I want to call your attention to our safe harbor provision for forward-looking statements that is posted on our website and as part of our quarterly update. The Safe Harbor provision identifies risk factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from the content of our forward-looking statements for the reasons we cite in our Form 10-K and other SEC filings, including uncertainties posed by the difficulty in predicting future outcomes. Joining us today will be Lordstown Motors founder, CEO and Chairman Steve Burns, President Rich Schmidt, and CFO Julio Rodriguez. Steve will provide a strategic update on the business followed by Rich, who will give a more detailed update on production, and then Julio will cover the financial results, followed by Steve, who will provide our outlook and closing remarks. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Steve Burns.

Thank you, Carter, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you very much for joining us on Lordstown Motors' inaugural earnings call. Before we begin to discuss all the great progress we have made as we march towards the start of production in September, we want to take a moment and acknowledge that we are aware of the short seller's report. We've also received a request for information from the SEC, and we are cooperating with that inquiry. In addition, the Board of Directors has formed a special committee to review these matters. That is all we can say, and we cannot comment on this during the Q&A period following this call or any follow-up questions and conversations until the special committee has finished its review. Now, on to the call. We've been hard at work, and we are excited to describe our mission, our culture, and our progress to you today. At Lordstown, our mission is to be the leading manufacturer for electric light duty trucks in America. The definition of light duty trucks in the US generally falls under three categories, pickup trucks, vans, and large SUVs. The first step in achieving our goal is to enter into the mass production of our first vehicle, the Endurance electric pickup truck. The Lordstown Endurance will be the first full-size electric pickup truck targeted at the underserved commercial fleet market and delivering on our commitment to sustainability and efficiency in the automotive landscape. Why a pickup truck? I think most people know that the best-selling three vehicles in America are all full-size pickup trucks. And I think most people know that pickup trucks don't get the best fuel economy. Actually, after 95 years of refinement, pickup trucks are still hugely inefficient machines that do more than their fair share of polluting our air and wasting our energy. But pickup trucks are the backbone of workers in America. We need pickup trucks. We just need a better one. To break this 95-year-old cycle, We needed a new kind of truck and a new kind of car company. We are approaching 500 employees strong now, and we'll be up to 1,000 strong by the end of the year. Each employee has been hand selected for their talent, their grit, and their desire to reinvent the pickup truck and clean up our air. The result of this culture is a pickup truck that gets the equivalent of 75 miles per gallon. and is designed to have better traction, handling, and ride quality than any pickup truck on the market today. And because we're targeting fleet customers, we engineered a completely new, radically simple drivetrain so that we can price the Endurance on par with a comparably equipped gasoline pickup truck. Actually, we project that the Endurance will save our customers $20,000 over a five-year period versus owning and operating a conventional pickup truck. We achieve both price and functional parity with an extremely mature internal combustion pickup truck market by inventing a skateboard or a chassis that is the simplest ever produced. Our hub motor-based skateboard provides true all-wheel drive. And yet, it has only four moving parts in its driveline, the motors that are in each wheel. We've been testing our skateboard in every conceivable harsh condition. And I can tell you personally, it drives fantastic, like no other vehicle before it. And it can handle all the rough and tumble that a user can throw at it. We are even entering into the extreme Baja off-road race next month in Mexico to demonstrate just how tough and versatile it is. In addition to our impressive human capital, we also have the necessary hard assets to accomplish our goals, thanks to the near production-ready plant in Ohio that we acquired from General Motors. We have 6 million square feet of state-of-the-art stamping, body, assembly, robotics, and paint that we have reconfigured to make our endurance truck. The endurance is on track to begin production in September of this year. We expect to make an endurance every six minutes when we start production this year and work our way up to an endurance every four minutes next year. We expect our first mover advantage in the marketplace will enable us to capture the pent-up demand of pickup truck users across the country that are tired of roughly 16 to 17 miles per gallon and desire more climate-friendly vehicles. For a new vehicle launch to be successful in America, we feel there are a few key fundamentals. One, customer demand. Two, innovation and best of breed engineering. Three, the necessary skills and machinery to achieve mass production. And four, a comprehensive go to market strategy. I will touch briefly on the progress towards each of these. And then Rich will drill down on production and engineering for you. First, our progress on the endurance. We are currently in beta production and remain on track to complete our first betas this month. We will build 57 beta endurance trucks, which we will use for durability, crash testing, and validation purposes. We'll also lend several trucks to some of our early customers for their feedback. We released some footage today on our social media channels and on our website that was taken in our plant yesterday, showing the betas being built in our factory. Really quite remarkable, and I encourage you to view them if you can. Our interactions with our customers have allowed us to gauge demand from prospective customers and resellers. This work has afforded us an important glimpse into the potential demand and enabled us to tool our factory to achieve the appropriate production volumes. This gauge is important because tooling can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take years to implement. So you want to dial it in as close as possible. With beta production now underway, we are able to obtain more substantial levels of commitment from our prospective customers. We are extremely excited to already have arrangement with fleet management companies relating to 20,000 of our endurance trucks. Under these arrangements, the fleet management companies have agreed to use reasonable efforts to obtain purchase commitments from their clients. At this stage in our evolution, the arrangements must be conditional because we won't have the product until later this year. For a pre-production company, we are very pleased with this level of customer demand. One early customer we'd like to highlight is Holman Enterprises' ARI unit. one of the largest fleet management companies in the U.S., with approximately 2 million fleet vehicles under management. We have signed a multi-year marketing and upfit agreement with Holman. As far as total addressable market, our estimates are that there are more than 30 million light-duty pickup trucks on U.S. roads currently, and we see no reason why the vast majority of those trucks shouldn't be electric over time. Moving on to intellectual property and our best of breed engineering. We believe we have differentiated technologies and a vertically integrated manufacturing approach. We believe this vertical integration yields the best profitability and the ability to control one's product. As an example of our vertical integration, we are building out an 800,000 square foot propulsion line. that will manufacture our battery packs and our electric motors in-house. This should be the second largest facility of its kind in the US. What we believe separates us from our competitors and positions us for future success is our unique hub motor architecture, the integration of the software within the entire vehicle, and our ability to control current and future vehicle designs, platforms, and to be able to build a moat around our intellectual property. Our hub motor integration allows for true, electronically controlled, independent four-wheel drive with minimal efficiency losses, unlike competitive models that still use some sort of mechanical routing of power to the wheels. Our goal is to make the Endurance the most economical, the cleanest, the best handling, and the safest pickup truck ever made. Now for our go-to-market strategy. Our strategy involves a multifaceted approach. We are working with Camping World to build out a national service and parts network. Because of their 170-plus locations in 38 states, Camping World provides a great network for any local, regional, or national commercial fleet customers. Campion World boasts a deep and experienced service team that will learn how to service electric vehicles and has the capability to offer roadside assistance through its affiliate, Good Sam, and is in the process of adding fast charging stations to all its locations. Our goal for this evolving partnership is to give our commercial fleet customers comfort that their service needs will be seamless and exemplary. We're also building out our own Lordstown service stations in those areas which we expect the greatest cluster of demand. At least initially, that's California and the Midwest broadly. To that end, we recently obtained our first dealer license to sell direct in California. We also opened our first sales and service center in Irvine, California, which also houses our design team that focuses on software for our in-vehicle systems. We also believe California will be aggressive in adopting electric work trucks and expect our first mover production advantage could materially boost our order book in 2022. And to answer you all before you ask, naturally, we are evaluating consumer opportunity for the Endurance. But it's a little too early to talk about that right now. As we look beyond the Endurance, we are confident, very confident, that our skateboard chassis design is leverageable to other vehicles. Our next vehicle will be an all-electric, four-wheel drive, high-top van with a target range of up to 350 miles, whose first application will be as a recreational vehicle that we intend to sell through Camping World's Electric World Network. It will be the first mass-produced, all-electric RV. And although the first use case of the van is an RV, we feel there will be many commercial use cases for an electric van of this size and capability. We have therefore accelerated work on the van and will unveil a demonstration vehicle in early summer. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to Rich Schmidt, President of Lordstown Motors, for a more detailed review of the production and engineering.