Aurelia Butler

Lordstown Motors, which started producing the electric Endurance truck in limited quantities last fall, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.Foxconn, which was building the Endurance at a plant in Ohio, backed out of a $170 million investment in Lordstown earlier this year, putting the nascent electric carmaker in jeopardy.Lordstown is also filing a lawsuit against Foxconn, claiming that the electronics company broke the terms of the investment agreement.The Lordstown story may be coming to an end. The embattled automotive startup filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection today and is offering its Endurance electric pickup and related assets for sale. Lordstown Motors was founded in 2018 and built a handful of trucks starting in September 2022 before pausing production to address quality issues in February.The bankruptcy filing comes just a couple of months after Lordstown Motors admitted there was “substantial doubt regarding our ability to continue as a going concern,” an ominous forecast prompted by a delisting warning from the Nasdaq in April. That warning—issued because the company’s share price had closed below $1 a couple of months earlier and had failed to recover—put Lordstown in apparent breach of its investment agreement with Taiwanese electronics company Foxconn. The Lordstown StoryFoxconn had purchased the Lordstown, Ohio, factory from the eponymous automaker in 2022, invested $50 million into the EV startup, and was building the Endurance under contract. Foxconn had agreed to another investment of $170 million in November 2022, but the delisting warning from the Nasdaq caused Foxconn to hesitate, threatening to back out of the agreement if Lordstown didn’t settle its stock listing situation. Lordstown countered that the terms of the contract didn’t allow Foxconn to exit the deal and that the claims of a breach in the agreement were unfounded. Along with filing for bankruptcy, Lordstown also announced today that it was filing a lawsuit against Hon Hai Technology Group, as Foxconn is known in China and Taiwan. The lawsuit focuses on “Foxconn’s fraud and willful and consistent failure to live up to its commercial and financial commitments to the company,” according to Lordstown. The startup claims that “Foxconn’s actions led to material damage to the Company as well as its future prospects.” Lordstown MotorsIts unclear what will happen to the few Endurances that were produced, and whether any are still in the hands of customers, with the February production pause also including a recall of 19 vehicles. Although Chapter 11 bankruptcy is usually structured as a reorganization that aims to keep the business alive, Lordstown’s plans to sell its Endurance truck assets leave the question of what will be left by the end of the process. Regardless if Lordstown comes out the other side intact, the bankruptcy filing serves as a stark reminder that, despite the boom of EV startups in recent years, it is incredibly hard to create an automaker from scratch and bring a car to market.This content is imported from poll. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.Associate News EditorCaleb Miller began blogging about cars at 13 years old, and he realized his dream of writing for a car magazine after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University and joining the Car and Driver team. He loves quirky and obscure autos, aiming to one day own something bizarre like a Nissan S-Cargo, and is an avid motorsports fan. More

The Singer DLS Turbo is a modern-day reinterpretation of the Porsche 934/5 endurance racers from the 1970s.Based on 964-generation 911s, Singer’s latest custom-built cars boast a carbon-fiber widebody, a 700-hp twin-turbo 3.8-liter flat-six, and a manual gearbox. Singer offers the DLS Turbo with track- or road-oriented hardware, with the former featuring an enormous rear wing.Nearly every iteration of the Porsche 911 now comes with a turbocharger—in fact, you have to pay more for the ones that don’t—but the ones that wear the “Turbo” script out back remain very special. Porsche wasn’t the first company to adapt turbocharging for race and road, but it was perhaps the most successful. In 1977, the owner of a Porsche 930 could have driven their whale-tailed grand tourer to all eight races of the SCCA Trans American series and seen the racing version of the road car win a convincing six times. Singer, the vaunted Porsche restoration house, has now revealed a new creation that combines both into the essence of a 911 Turbo.A 934/5 RebornAs ever, Singer is very careful to point out that it is not a boutique manufacturer like RUF or Alpina, but it merely seeks to reimagine what the ideal of a Porsche 911 could be. Founded in 2009, the company now has multiple rivals but also possibly no real competition. In the classic 911 world where cost is no object, a Singerized Porsche is the standard which others attempt to achieve.Two new cars seek to raise an already high bar somewhere into the upper ionosphere. Built as tribute to the Porsche 934/5 racing machines that dominated in endurance racing, the “Dynamic and Lightweighting Study (DLS) – Turbo,” are a matched pair of rocketships, one built for the track, the other for the road. Dynamics and Lightweight Study sounds like a chapter out of an aeronautical engineering textbook, but the actual experience is more Top Gun: Maverick. The original DLS was created in 2008, infused with exotic composite materials and built around a naturally aspirated 4.0-liter flat-six built by Williams Advanced Engineering. That engine made 500 horsepower at 9300 rpm and was filled with excruciatingly painful details like each individual valve costing $30,000. The whole DLS cost $1.8 million, yet the limited number were almost immediately all spoken for.Singer also reimagined the 911 Turbo last year, slightly softened up versus the company’s previous projects. With a torque-rich and flexible turbocharged 3.8-liter flat-six good for 450 horsepower, both a coupe and later a 510-hp cabriolet variant were intended to be grand tourers in the same mold as the original 911 Turbo. A six-speed manual provided two more forward gears than customers got in the 1970s.Track or Road?The new DLS Turbo, which has a name like a gaming mouse, combines the hardcore engineering of the F1-style 911 rebuilt with the tremendous power available via forced induction. Both the Blood Orange track-focused car and the Moet Black road-oriented machine have a new twin-turbo 3.8-liter flat-six with electric wastegates and air-to-water intercooling. It makes an estimated 700 horsepower and revs to over 9000 rpm.If being around the earliest Singer restorations was all about noticing the subtle details, the two DLS Turbo models are as wild as it comes. Huge rear fenders balloon out like in a modern interpretation of the 1970s racers of IMSA and Le Mans. The road-going car has a duckbill spoiler rather than the box-wing of the track-focused machine, but both look completely insane.The closest comparison is the Kremer K3 Strasse commissioned by F1 team owner Walter Wolf in 1980. However, where that near-800 horsepower bit of lunacy ate a set of rear tires every hundred miles and only had air-conditioning for the driver, Singer’s DLS Turbo builds will doubtless be as flawlessly executed as each one of its former creations. It is therefore to be hoped that, despite the eye-watering, multi-million dollar cost of each one of these cars, they actually get driven. After all, while the 911 Turbo is now a highly collectible car, especially the racing version, Porsche differentiated itself from the Italian exotics by building cars that were intended to endure. One of the highest-mileage 911s in existence, a 1976 Canadian-market 930 owned by original-owner Bill MacEachern of Toronto, Ontario, now has more than 800,000 miles on its odometer.As a cross-pollination between endurance racer and road-car, these are the wildest Singer-restored Porsche 911s yet. The bar is raised, the standard reset.Related StoriesThis content is imported from poll. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.Contributing EditorBrendan McAleer is a freelance writer and photographer based in North Vancouver, B.C., Canada. He grew up splitting his knuckles on British automobiles, came of age in the golden era of Japanese sport-compact performance, and began writing about cars and people in 2008. His particular interest is the intersection between humanity and machinery, whether it is the racing career of Walter Cronkite or Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s half-century obsession with the Citroën 2CV. He has taught both of his young daughters how to shift a manual transmission and is grateful for the excuse they provide to be perpetually buying Hot Wheels. More

Aston Martin and Lucid are partnering up, with Aston’s future EVs set to use Lucid’s next-gen electric motors.An SUV and three sports cars are part of Aston’s EV plans, and some models could offer up to 1500 horsepower.The first Aston Martin EV is set to arrive in 2025.The news surrounding Aston Martin over the last few years has often felt like an automotive soap opera. In the last five years, the British sports-car maker has gone through a poorly received IPO, parted ways with two CEOs, and gained an increasing number of co-owners. Both Mercedes-Benz and Chinese giant Geely acquired stakes alongside the consortium led by Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, who is now also Aston’s executive chairman. But now Aston has gained another equity partner as it looks towards an electric future, signing a deal with Lucid that will see the U.S. EV maker supply much of the technology for Aston’s forthcoming range of fully electric models. The first is promised for as soon as 2025. In return, Lucid Motors will be paid $132 million in cash for its expertise and will also be given a 3.7 percent stake in Aston Martin worth another $100 million. It is also guaranteed that Aston will buy at least $225 million in powertrain components.More on LucidSpeaking to journalists at the company’s Gaydon HQ this afternoon, Stroll said that taking control of Aston proved proved to be the biggest challenge in his career. “Some of which I understood, some of which I clearly didn’t,” he admitted. The issues included dealing with excess inventory—shutting down production for nearly a year—and then raising the money required to develop new models, with this including a technology supply agreement with Mercedes. That deal included both the AMG-sourced V-8 engines and Mercedes electronic architecture that Aston is already using, but also made provisions for a deeper agreement that would see Aston’s future EV models being based on Mercedes expertise. That prospect has effectively ended with the new Lucid deal, although Stroll was quick to point out that the existing Mercedes partnership for pure combustion and hybrid powertrains will continue.Aston Martin RapidEAston MartinAston first tried to build an EV with the RapidE sedan nearly 10 years ago. This was intended for a limited production run, although only a single demonstrator was constructed. Subsequently the company planned to create a new EV platform to underpin Lagonda-branded models, although those were abandoned when it ran into its first financial crisis. But with luxury rivals including Bentley, Lamborghini, and Rolls-Royce working on electric models, Lucid’s expertise would seem to offer Aston a potential shortcut to what could be segment-leading performance.No electric Aston will be short on urge. The forthcoming triple-motor Lucid Air Sapphire is set to have more than 1200 horsepower, but Lucid Group CEO Peter Rawlinson confirmed at the Aston briefing that the deal is actually for the company’s next-generation electric-motor technology. Aston CTO Roberto Fedeli said that Aston is working on what will become its own scalable EV platform that is set to feature similar bonded aluminum construction to the technique that underpins the company’s combustion models. But Lucid will supply both the twin rear motors and the compact battery cell technology that will allow low packs to be created to suit Aston’s sleek designs. Lucid Air Sapphire motorLucidFedeli told journalists that Aston is working to develop its own front motors, with the EV set to use versions of the ones that will feature in the forthcoming mid-engined plug-in-hybrid Valhalla hypercar. He also said the company is working on an active drag reduction technique in collaboration with the Aston Martin Formula 1 team, one that sounds like the “streamline mode” of the GMA T.50. A quad-motor layout will allow torque vectoring at both ends, and the prospect of a peak power output beyond 1500 hp.Aston is also planning multiple EV models. The first of these will likely be a sleek SUV given the dynamics of the luxury market. Beyond that, Stroll confirms the plan is to create differently sized EVs similar to the brand’s three different front-engined sports cars. But, these won’t be electric versions of combustion models like the Maserati GranTurismo Folgore. It’s no wonder that Aston is also planning to radically revise its retail experience by opening company-owned flagship stores, the first in New York; they will need plenty of floor space just to show the full lineup.More on Aston and EVsBefore the arrival of the first EV in 2025, Aston has already confirmed it will have replaced all of its existing sports cars with fresh models; the already announced DB12 is set to be joined soon by replacements for both the current Vantage and DBS. We can also expect a revised DBX which will include the option of a plug-in hybrid, with the Valhalla set to arrive next year as well. Before that, we’re also set to see an ultra-limited model created to celebrate Aston’s 110th anniversary this year.Most important is the improving financial situation. Aston’s revenue has more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, with Stroll predicting that the company will become “cashflow positive” next year—bringing in more money than it is spending. Could Aston Martin’s roller-coaster fortunes be set for the biggest climb yet?This content is imported from poll. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.European EditorMike Duff has been writing about the auto industry for two decades and calls the UK home, although he normally lives life on the road. He loves old cars and adventure in unlikely places, with career highlights including driving to Chernobyl in a Lada. More

For years, Apple fans have claimed a connection between the tech giant and Route 14 Investment Partners based on thin evidence.We visited Route 14’s Arizona proving ground and spotted a car with a sensor stack with a design like one Apple has been testing.We also uncovered paperwork that appears to connect at least one individual to both companies. In late 2005, DaimlerChrysler sold its proving ground in Wittmann, Arizona, to homebuilder Toll Brothers and its partners for $312 million. The new owners intended to use the 5500-acre property to develop a planned community with about 33,000 homes. It never materialized, and in 2010, the developers defaulted on their loan, leaving the proving ground in the possession of the project’s lender, iStar.Related StoriesAfter more than a decade of ownership, the commercial real-estate finance company finally unloaded the land, selling it to Route 14 Investment Partners LLC in July 2021 for $125 million. Route 14 Investment Partners was no stranger to the property. Approximately five years earlier, the New York–based iStar had begun leasing the proving ground to the little-known limited-liability company.Much about Route 14 Investment Partners remains unknown, as there’s minimal public information available about the presumably automotive-related company. However, rumors persist that Route 14 Investment Partners is a company related to Apple’s car project, once—and possibly still—known as “Project Titan.”© 2023 GoogleApple fans point to purported statements from unnamed sources confirming this, as well as the fact that Route 14 Investment Partners formed shortly after the tech giant’s rumored car project first came to light in early 2015. They also note that both Route 14 Investment Partners and Apple use CT Corporation’s Corporation Trust Company, which serves as a registered agent for companies that incorporate in Delaware, allowing businesses to take advantage of the First State’s tax benefits without setting up dedicated offices there. The fact that hundreds of thousands of other businesses, including Ford, Toyota, and Tesla, have used CT’s services only emphasizes the circumstantial nature of this thin connection between Apple and Route 14 Investment Partners. Autonomous in ArizonaLast month we flew to Arizona to visit Route 14 Investment Partners’ proving ground in Wittmann. With little precipitation and lots of sunshine, the sleepy unincorporated desert community, located approximately 35 miles northwest of Phoenix, is conducive to autonomous-vehicle testing. Greg S. Fink|Car and DriverBased on what we witnessed while staking out the proving ground, we can confirm the presence of self-driving-vehicle technology at Route 14 Investment Partners’ facility. We captured images of a white fourth-generation Lexus RX, sensor stack mounted to its roof, undergoing testing within the fenced-in perimeter of the proving ground.More telling is the design of the sensor stack, which matches those that Apple has fitted to multiple Lexus RXs photographed in California. Pictures of these vehicles are all over the web, and many include a clear view of each vehicle’s license tag—information we used to pull the vehicle identification number (VIN) for five of the California-registered Lexus SUVs. picture alliance|Getty ImagesWe then crosschecked each VIN against those listed within California’s 2022 Autonomous Mileage Reports. (The Golden State requires any autonomous-vehicle developer testing its technology on public roads to file data on system disengagements.) The result? All five VINs correlated with reports submitted by Apple. Admittedly, it’s possible that another company is toying with a similar sensor-pack design. Without any license plate or VIN information for the RX we spotted at the former DaimlerChrysler proving ground, our evidence, though stronger than a shared registered agent in Delaware, still seemed too weak on its own to convince a proverbial jury that this proves “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Route 14 Investment Partners is an Apple offshoot.Environmental ConnectionAlthough we saw nothing else of note while staking out the proving ground, we did stumble across a sign posted high up on a portion of the chain-link fence surrounding the property:Greg S. Fink|Car and DriverIn the months before our Arizona trip, we searched public-records databases for clues that might reveal additional details about Route 14 Investment Partners. In all that time, we’d never checked the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) website. It was literally a sign from above. After leaving Wittmann and checking in to our hotel in nearby Surprise, Arizona, we hunted for records posted on ADEQ’s website, one of which was for the water system at the proving ground. The document lists the names and contact information of the system’s administrative contact and owner. Both phone numbers have Silicon Valley area codes, and the owner’s is shared with lines at Apple headquarters in Cupertino.Neither individual answered our calls. That said, our research gives us reason to believe that the listed owner, William Lynch, directly connects Route 14 Investment Partners to Apple.appleAs evidenced by Lynch’s Route 14 Investment Partners email address and the voicemail greeting of the phone number listed in the ADEQ document, Lynch does not typically go by the name William. Rather, he goes by Ken. A brief LinkedIn search brought up the profile of an Apple employee named Ken Lynch who has spent close to a decade working for the company in the field of environment, health, and safety. Not conclusive, but certainly interesting.Once again, we looked to public records for assistance, and we soon came across EPA documents that included contact information for an Apple-associated Ken Lynch.We called the number listed next to Ken Lynch’s name on these Apple-related EPA submissions and were sent to voicemail. A greeting nearly indistinguishable from the one associated with Lynch’s Route 14 Investment Partners phone number addressed us on this line as well. We recorded both greetings and listened to them back to back several times. We won’t declare with certainty that these two phone numbers belong to the same Ken Lynch until Lynch responds to our queries and puts this question to bed. For its part, Apple let us know that the company had nothing to share on the matters of its or its employees’ connections to Route 14 Investment Partners.Car and DriverIs Apple All In?For years, circumstantial evidence drove the narrative that linked Route 14 Investment Partners to Apple’s car project. Now we have harder evidence that more directly connects the two companies.If this is the case, then Route 14 Investment Partners’ $125 million purchase of the old DaimlerChrysler proving ground appears to indicate Apple’s financial commitment to creating a car of its own, presumably one with profitability in mind. After all, Apple did not become a multi-trillion-dollar company by haphazardly and needlessly spending hundreds of millions to develop financially futile products.Senior EditorDespite their shared last name, Greg Fink is not related to Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s infamous Rat Fink. Both Finks, however, are known for their love of cars, car culture, and—strangely—monogrammed one-piece bathing suits. Greg’s career in the media industry goes back more than a decade. His previous experience includes stints as an editor at publications such as U.S. News & World Report, The Huffington Post, Motor1.com, and MotorTrend. More