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LORDSTOWN, Ohio (WYTV) – Lordstown Motors’ stock rose almost 14% on Tuesday. This comes just one day after President Joe Biden’s announcement to change the federal fleet over to electric vehicles.
“The federal government also owns an enormous fleet of vehicles, which we’re going to replace with clean, electric vehicles made right here in America by American workers, creating millions of jobs — a million autoworker jobs in clean energy — and vehicles that are net-zero emissions,” President Biden said.
More than 600,000 gas vehicles could be exiting the roads in the coming years.
“This will be the largest mobilization of public investment in procurement, infrastructure and R&D since World War II,” President Biden said.
“We’ve believed for a while that fleets are prime for electrification, especially government fleets,” said Ryan Hallett, a Lordstown Motors spokesperson.
Lordstown Motors is in its final testing stages for the Endurance, its commercial-grade electric pickup.
“Fleets that are prime for electrification are ones that are primarily local, and a lot of government fleets do that sort of not going far from home base so they can charge overnight,” Hallett said.
But the electrification of the federal fleet still has a lot of uncertainty.
“We don’t know yet. He made allusions that he might announce something like this,” Hallett said. “We feel optimistic that an order like this will in one way or another find its way to Lordstown.”
Even if Lordstown Motors doesn’t land a government contract, they say an announcement like this could go a long way to get regular people into electric cars.
“The way the stock has risen today goes back to the idea that an announcement like this shows a major commitment, a major sense of vote of confidence for electric vehicles,” Hallett said.