Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Lordstown Motors first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. If you require any further assistance please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your host today, Carter Driscoll, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and thank you to all for joining Lordstown Motors' first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. To supplement today's discussion, please go to our IR 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 as 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 that we cite in our Form 10-Q 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. 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. Thanks, Carter. Welcome to everyone. Our mission here at Lordstown Motors is to be the leading manufacturer for electric light-duty trucks in the U.S. Our first vehicle, the all-electric Endurance work truck, is on track to start limited production in late September. We expect to start deliveries later in fourth quarter. As a reminder, the Endurance is a full-size pickup truck that we believe can achieve the equivalent of 75 MPG and travel up to 250 mi on a charge. Today, I'm very excited to announce a major milestone. We have started physical crash testing of our beta vehicles. We have passed every test we have taken on the first attempt, including the full-speed frontal and the side pole test. The data results from the physical crashes correlates very closely to our software model, and we are therefore reiterating our belief that we can achieve a five-star safety rating, front, side, and rear, for the final version of the Endurance. To date, the Endurance has met the front impact Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard, which is FMVSS 208, and the side impact FMVSS 214 requirements through these actual crash tests held at the federally approved TRC test facility in Ohio. These are the two most difficult tests for any vehicle, and we passed the requirements with our beta vehicles. These are critical milestones for us, and remove some of the biggest technical barriers. This provides us a solid foundation as we complete our development and validation work. We are continuing to work on establishing relationships with fleet management companies that we believe can be the basis for meaningful revenue once the truck is ready for sale and we can demonstrate that it performs to our expectations. These include our previously announced series agreements with Holman, as well as a recent agreement we've entered into with Pride Group. We are also in discussions with several charging companies and infrastructure providers to help us provide a simple, seamless solution for our potential customers. Our ability to produce enough vehicles to satisfy our expected market demand depends on many variables, such as suppliers and passing all required regulatory hurdles, and also our access to capital. Our research indicates a very robust demand for our vehicles. However, capital may limit our ability to make as many vehicles as we would like, and as such, we are constantly evaluating our capital needs and the various types of capital available to us, including strategic capital. As the automotive world speeds towards vehicle electrification, it's starting to be clear to many that an electric full-size pickup truck with a 250-mi range is going to be quite attractive to a large portion of the market. As a new OEM, we are often asked how we are able to be first to market in the highly competitive pickup truck category in the U.S., and how are we able to offer the Endurance at such a competitive price point. Well, we have two major advantages that have enabled us to reach our progress to date. We believe that the Endurance will be the simplest mass-produced truck ever made, far simpler and smarter than any internal combustion vehicle, and even simpler than any EV on the road today. Our innovative hub motor-based architecture enables us to use advanced proprietary software-based motor control rather than mechanical routing of power to each wheel. The result is a smart pickup truck that is robust enough to handle the most demanding of duty cycles, but easily fueled, maintained, and serviced, and yet can be offered at an attractive price point to our customers. This is just our first model. Our goal is that subsequent options will include things like advanced informatics and crash avoidance features that we offer through over-the-air software updates. Another expected benefit of the physical simplicity of our vehicle is increased uptime for our customers, which translates into a lower total cost of ownership, the key metric that drives customer demand and product loyalty. We have been conducting robust testing of electric hub motor and vehicle design over the last year, including entering the Baja race. The race allowed us to validate our vehicle performance in literally the harshest of environments. While we are still learning how to optimize fast charging in such a terrain, we had no mechanical issues in the race and were able to accomplish two important goals. One, validate our hub motors, frame, thermal management system, and battery pack. Two, advance our DC fast charging capabilities. We learned that our production hub motor design is well-suited to perform in low-traction environments like Baja sand, and our battery pack is resilient to high torques and high impacts. We also learned that our thermal management system was able to compensate in the demanding Baja race environment. For DC fast charging, the race requirements for quick recharging prompted us to modify our DC fast-charging capabilities months earlier than we had planned. As a point of clarification, our production battery pack worked to the expected range and its mechanical performance was flawless. The reality of any battery pack is that it has a fixed amount of energy. Relative to the energy consumption of the vehicle, sand and loose soil has 4x higher coefficient of friction than a paved road does. Our energy usage was on par with our simulations, increasing our confidence that our vehicle's range will meet the 250-mi target for an average customer duty cycle. Finally, 40 mi of Baja is enough evidence that our thermal and powertrain performance assumptions are correct in such extreme use case. Final testing and validation for our production vehicles will be completed at greater than 500,000 mi of paved and hard-packed dirt roads. The Endurance customer will receive a vehicle with amazing performance and safety pedigree. In addition, we are thrilled to have the opportunity to illustrate the capabilities of our Endurance demonstration vehicle to the United States Army as a potential vehicle for the eLRV, which is Electric Light Reconnaissance Vehicle program. We look forward to working with the U.S. Army should the opportunity present itself in the future. Our second advantage is in the production readiness for scale. Our former GM facility has now been upgraded to EV readiness with full stamping, robotic body welding, assembly, and paint. This plant would normally have required billions of dollars of investment to build as a greenfield. Our team is very proud of the betas we have built here, proud of their quality, safety, and drivability. One very important production note we want to remind you of is our 800,000 sq ft propulsion facility, which will manufacture our battery packs and electric hub motors, and it will be one of the largest battery pack lines in North America and the largest hub motor facility globally. This will be an amazing accomplishment, and we fully expect our investments in our battery pack design and its automated production to provide us with a key competitive edge, both in cost control and pack quality. The first phase of the pack line is installed and is being tested currently. The line will make battery modules that contain over 6,000 individual cells that are assembled into every Endurance. It will do so without human hands ever touching the cells. It is a mechanical wonder. We believe will be a huge strategic advantage for us. Next, we will be building out our hub motor production line this summer. We can't wait to show everyone our vertically integrated factory during Lordstown Week, starting June 21st. In addition, we have established in-house production of key components and secured critical supply chain partners to support our ability to scale. This includes agreements with semiconductors, inverters, cells, and frame. Although COVID has constrained the automotive supply chain globally and has caused material increase in our R&D expenditures, we have been proactive in this effort. Finally, I want to remind everyone that we have begun work on our second vehicle, an all-electric van. It's built on the Endurance chassis, which leverages many of the same parts, engineering, and existing supplier agreements. We will share a prototype with you this summer. Our hub motor-based skateboard is especially well-suited for a van because of the lower floor height that results in more cargo space and has easier access and egress. Leverage is the way to build a strong, multifaceted automotive company. We are leveraging much of the Endurance technology in the van and all our future vehicles. With that, I will turn the call over to Rich to discuss our progress on production, engineering, and regulatory compliance. Thank you, Steve, and good afternoon to everyone on the call. I am Rich Schmidt, President of Lordstown Motors, and I'm happy to provide an update on production, engineering, and testing. First, I will update you on the betas, followed by progress on the plant retooling and propulsion build-out, and finally, provide some context on our early crash test and other vehicle validation efforts. First, the Endurance betas. As Steve said, we are firmly on track with our beta builds and are close to completing this program made up of 21 for testing and the rest for production validations. Crash sled tests are used by the industry to verify that the airbags, seat belts, and pretensioners work within the Endurance interior for the CAE simulation predictions for FMVSS performance. We have also begun durability testing, understanding how hard it is to pass crash tests. The requirements for selling vehicles is to meet FMVSS regulations, which we expect to pass without issues. The objective is to achieve competitive NCAP test star ratings, which are not mandatory at this point. We do not see any impediments to meeting our NCAP targets. Again, based on early results, we are excited to report that we believe the Endurance remains on track to achieve a five-star rating. We are retooling the plant to be flexible, to enable us to build multiple vehicle platforms inexpensively, from trucks to cars. To conduct their crash and engineering validations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, NHTSA, in late summer as one of the final steps before production. Let's talk about the retooling. For stamping, all four stamping presses are up. We began reconditioning and proving out. Our robotic body shop, the most expensive tooling of our plant, is up and running, including the laser roof welds. The paint shop is on schedule and is virtually complete. General Assembly is also on track. Finally, we have started to install the new chassis marriage line. Shifting focus to propulsion, we are due to start building the first electric hub motor line on-site in July. It is currently being validated by our partners. We anticipate commissioning the first motor line before the start of production in late September. We believe that once all lines are built and commissioned, that we should be the largest manufacturer in automotive hub motors in the world. With that, I will hand it over to Julio to take you through the financial results. Thank you. Thank you, Rich. Good afternoon. I also want to thank everyone for joining today's call. I am Julio Rodriguez, the Chief Financial Officer, and I will review our first quarter 2021 results. As you may have seen, we published an Form 8-K on May 11 that addressed the recent statements levied by the SEC regarding the accounting treatment for warrants issued by SPACs. We're continuing to work on completing the restatement and expect to be in a position to file our Form 10-K/A and Form 10-Q soon. Now, turning to our financials. All our financials are presented in accordance with GAAP. In the first quarter of 2021, we recorded an operating net loss of $106 million. Our expenses consisted of $40 million in selling and administrative expenses and $92 million in R&D, of which $1.9 million is stock compensation expense. The higher-than-expected R&D expense is largely from higher part costs from a supply chain that remains under duress from COVID issues, which impacted our beta costs, higher costs of shipping, including expedited shipping, and greater use of temporary external engineering efforts. For the balance sheet, we ended the first quarter of 2021 with a total cash position of $587 million. We have total assets of $779 million, largely consisting of our cash position, + $155 million in PP&E, $76 million in total liabilities, mainly accounts payable, and $703 million in shareholders' equity. From a cash flow perspective, we used $72 million in cash from operations, used $53 million in investing activities from purchases of capital assets, and generated $83 million from financing activities, mainly from warrant exercises. Our combined cash used in operations and investment was $125 million, excluding the $82 million in cash we received from warrant exercises. We ended the quarter with approximately 177 million shares. If all outstanding warrants were converted today, we would have approximately 180 million diluted shares outstanding, not counting employee stock options. Thank you, and I will turn the call back over to Steve, who will provide our outlook and closing remarks. Steve? Thanks, Julio. As we discussed in our last earnings call, in response to the short seller's report, our board of directors established a special committee of independent directors to investigate the allegations made by the short seller. The SEC has also commenced an investigation and has sought information from us, and we are cooperating with that investigation. The special committee's review is ongoing, and we expect that the special committee will be in a position to report on the results of their review of the allegations in the short seller report prior to the end of the second quarter. Pending the release of those results, neither the special committee nor the company is in a position to comment further on the short seller report. Now on to guidance. As we have already indicated, our costs have exceeded our prior expectations for the reasons laid out earlier, and the pace of our production ramp will depend on our ability to secure additional funding. We are updating the outlook for 2021 that we provided last quarter. We continue to expect between $250 million and $275 million in CapEx. On the operating front, we now forecast $55 million-$60 million in SG&A, of which $4 million is stock compensation expense, and $280 million-$290 million in R&D, of which $7 million is stock compensation expense. We now forecast a net loss of between $360 million and $380 million, or approximately $2.05- $2.15 in loss per share using the 177 million basic class A shares. Let me explain a few additional key assumptions in this guidance. These forecasts would allow us to finish the year with approximately $50 million-$75 million in cash without any additional funding. In order to do so, we would be pursuing a conservative budget, reducing cost, and delaying investments, and the production would start in September would be, at best, 50% of the prior 2021 unit expectations. We are currently in discussions for an asset-backed financing opportunity that is at the preliminary stage. In addition, we also remain in due diligence for an application for the ATVM loan. Furthermore, we intend to engage in discussions with strategic investors, and we continue to seek and pursue opportunities in other tax credits and grants across multiple jurisdictions. We want to thank all our talented employees for their hard work and dedication across our offices in Lordstown, Ohio, Farmington Hills, Michigan, and Irvine, California. We are proud to be part of the Voltage Valley renaissance in Ohio and part of the solution to addressing the climate change and sustainability issues we all face. In summary, our mission is to bring to market the first full-size electric pickup truck and deliver on our commitment to safety, sustainability, and efficiency in the automotive landscape. We want to reiterate how delighted we are by the performance of our truck in these crash tests. These are major milestones that we have achieved on our road to production. Every member of the Lordstown team is laser-focused on bringing the Endurance to market as soon as we can using our innovative and disruptive technologies. We want the Lordstown Endurance to be the first mass-produced full-size electric truck in the world. Thank you for your time, and we very much look forward to welcoming you here in Lordstown the week of June 21st. Operator, we will now take questions. Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star then one on your telephone. To withdraw your question, please press the pound key. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Greg Lewis with BTIG. Your line is now open. Yeah. Thank you, and good afternoon, everybody. Yeah, Steve, hey, congrats on moving forward with the beta testing. Seems like it is progressing nice. I did want to dig in a little bit in, though, into the additional CapEx, kind of walking through and looking back at the previous quarter's press release. It looks like about 100+ of that was related to R&D. Could you walk us through some of those changes and what is driving that incremental capital requirement on the R&D side? Yep. Thanks, Greg. By the way, just before I jump in, I want to make sure everybody knows we have Darren Post, our Chief Engineer here, and John Vo, our VP of Propulsion. We just want to be able to answer any questions that you guys ask. The 50,000-ft view there is, because of supply chain, we've had to bring a lot more stuff in-house, right? Hurts you up front because you got a tool for that, you got to engineer for that, right? It helps you in the long run. It definitely helps you as the Endurance volumes go up and as we layer in additional vehicles like the van. The engineering, for example, a lot of people don't realize all the betas, right, those aren't inventory. Those are treated as R&D. As we march through everything, some things were a little more expensive than we thought. Some things we had to go outside for validation, like the brake testing and things like that. A lot of it's just how are we going to make these parts inside rather than purchase them. That kind of all dovetails into that. Okay, great. Thank you for that. I just did want to follow up. It looks like you're progressing through on making it through forward on the crash test. What other kind of hurdles should we be looking for over the next couple of months, kind of ahead of moving into pre-production in July? Right. Great question. Obviously, crash testing is a huge gating item, right? If that doesn't go as you think, or if it goes really sideways, that can cost you a year and hundreds and hundreds or $1 billion, right? That is why there are no small car companies usually in the United States because of that. To get past that gating item really should lower execution risk for anybody thinking about, are we going to get to September? The other thing is, as we've been making estimates over the last year, as you get closer to production, obviously the number of variables decreases. You just start to dial it in more and more. Of course, could supply chain continue to evolve? Yes. We have taken the liberty of securing the big things that we can see that we wouldn't be able to pivot. For example, we have our cells sourced from two different vendors. We have enough cells contractually to make it all the way through our foreseeable future. Electronics, the chip shortage you hear about all the time. We went ahead and upfront bought those, enough to get through this year, so that we're not constrained that way. Frame, we had to bring the frame in-house because that was at risk with suppliers. Things like that. I think in general, look, this is costing us more than we thought. Relative to the conventional thinking, we're moving very quick and really doing this for a good pricing. We're very happy with it. We don't like that it's moving, the target's moving a little bit. We have taken the attitude of first to market is everything. It's really starting to evolve that a vehicle like this size, this bed, this cab, this range, this price point, is a very popular item. Kind of with the events of last week, it's not just a niche item now. It's really gone mainstream. We think first-mover advantage is very important. We have always sided on the fact of how do we maintain September. Greg, just to drill down on your point about what's left to do. Yeah. Darren Post here. A couple of things. We go from beta where we have production intent designs with more prototype parts. As we go to PPV, we go to production intent parts off production tools. That's going to be the big change that happens in the PPV build. As we do that, we'll be continuing deeper into our durability testing, our brake tuning, steering systems, and vehicle dynamics work. That's a big milestone as we move forward. That sets us up for FMVSS 100 series, which are the nine crash regulatory tests that we need to do with the PPVs. That will start at the end of the summer. The short answer again, Greg, I think is regulatory is a big part of this business, right? As you can imagine. It's supply chain and regulatory. Once you get your recipe and your engineering done, and you've got a vehicle that physically is attractive to folks and also the specs meet their needs, then it comes down to regulatory and supply chain and your in-house production. Obviously in-house production, we pretty much control. Regulatory is a big part of U.S. automotive. We've, again, passed the biggest gate there is. These two tests that we've passed are the toughest two, and we wanted to get those up front. The fact that the test matches, highly correlates, as they say, to our software emulation, so it basically did exactly what we thought. It's quite remarkable to be at this stage. Okay, perfect. Thank you very much, and look forward to catching up in a couple of weeks. Thanks, Greg. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of John Murphy with Bank of America. Your line is now open. Good afternoon, guys. Just wanted to ask a first question. Obviously, you're commenting that you're going to raise capital sooner rather than later. You made mention on the call of an ABL or an asset-backed line or other structure. I'm just curious what you would put into that, and maybe if you could consider the Lordstown plants, what would the borrowing base be on that? Because you've talked about that being billions of dollars, I think $2 billion+ in replacement value. That would give you a lot of runway. How do you think about potentially pledging the Lordstown plants, and is that part of your discussion so far, and how big could that be? Good. Great question. Obviously we're looking at all types of capital, but non-dilutive like that and strategic is very important to us. We have zero debt and we have a lot of assets, so it lends itself, and we're buying a lot of parts. All that, there's folks that want to finance that. We're pretty mature on some of the discussions. They're early, but we feel it's a prudent thing to do, so we're spending time on that. Julio, did you want to say anything about that? Yeah. We have $1 billion in assets that we can use for, but we want to do capital financing of the new or next capital expenditures that we're going into. Right. There's a lot of folks that-- Not a lot of folks. There are folks that make a living out of financing CapEx, and then it always helps if you got extra collateral above and beyond that. Yeah. Got it. Okay. Just a second question. Steve, you were mentioning bringing or insourcing some parts, because the supply chain was not necessarily ready or disrupted by COVID, and that's one of the reasons expenses and CapEx went up. I think you said something about insourcing the frame. I'm just curious, when you think you need to make decisions for the frame, it's a big capital commitment and an R&D fee on your trucks and any vehicle, for that matter, that has a frame. What other parts are being insourced, and when do you kind of pull the trigger and do that? That seems like a pretty quick turnaround if you re-insource the frame since the last conference call. I'm just trying to understand how this is working? Yeah. Just for those that don't know, we are a body-on-frame vehicle, like all trucks or most trucks. The frame is where a truck gets its rigidity, its strength. We also have the thing that most people don't have to consider when they're engineering is we have a big battery pack in between that frame. Just, again, a quick note on the frontal crash test, it did not penetrate, didn't touch the battery pack. Those are the kind of considerations that go into your frame. The vendor that we had laid out for the frame suddenly was going to have to charge us more, and we just decided to take it in-house. It's constantly a, do we pay more for the part and hurts our profit margin, or do we source it inside? Sourcing inside, of course, like I said, because this frame will be very similar to the frame for the van. When you're going to be a multi-vehicle platform and you really can get those kind of leverages, it starts to change your decision process. The van is just looking more and more like a winner for us. That affects it. I'll let Rich maybe jump in a little bit there. Yeah. John, like Steve said, when we source stuff, we do, of course, have multiple suppliers. We had three different suppliers on the frame. Some of it was based on timing, some is based on cost. A lot of it was based on the timing schedule of the launch of the vehicle. Some of it was based on cost. Once we do the return of investment and the timeline of the launch in the Endurance in the fall, it came down to best option for us was to insource the frame. As Steve said, it gave us the flexibility to go to market on multiple vehicles quicker as well. Of course, we have our own stamping plant, and we have a lot of spare robots with the size of the facility that we've got from General Motors. It allowed us to put a lot of those processes in place, and it was the best business decision for us to insource the frame. That's the decision we went with as a business. Hey, Rich, may I just follow up? How fast can you make that decision? We're talking about a big decision. If you've got the stamping presses and the robots, the weld shop to do this, that's pretty impressive, and it seems like maybe you should've been thinking about doing that before, if you had all that capital. How fast do those decisions get made? We didn't really want to make that decision up front because of the capital investment, as you said. It was about a three-month decision that we really didn't want to have to do in the beginning because we were trying to save the capital. At the last minute, as Steve said, we had a supplier kind of pull back, and then the other supplier, let's say supplier B and supplier C, the price was very drastic to our BOM cost and timeline. We had to choose to bring it in-house at that point. The other decision that went into it is, where we're going to have to change it. What if the crash test didn't go well? We're going to have to change it. If you got an outside vendor making it, they're not as quick to respond. It did great in the crash test, but it is constantly a buy versus make conversation. It comes down to usually, it's a little more expensive upfront, of course, but pays off in the long run. As an early OEM, we're really cognizant. There are some people that sub everything out. Some of these startups just say, "I'm subbing everything out." We have a lot of folks here from Tesla, for example, and they know a new OEM, whoever you are, you're going to have early issues, and you want to be able to deal with those quickly, not have a third party taking their time or busy with another client or that sort of thing. Big things like frame, we just started realizing we should have in-house. In addition to the economics, it's also, we want to make sure that any early teething problems that we have as a new OEM, we're in position. Our battery packs, we're making the pack, we're making the hub motor, we're making the frame. The biggies are in our control. Let me just ask you real quick. One of the appeals of the business model is that you're getting out there in front of potential established competition, and we've heard news about the F-150 Lightning. Price point is relatively surprisingly well below $40,000. As you think about the competitive environment and the potential slowdown in your production ramp, how concerned are you in that putting you sort of on your back foot in the competitive environment and/or if you raise enough capital, could you re-accelerate your production ramp curve? Oh, yeah. Everything we're doing is to enable us to, when we receive the capital, we're looking at to be able to have it all, the pent-up system ready to go. I think the competitive landscape is the most important part of our conversation here. The fact that a competitor who's a very established automaker and has been working on this for several years and didn't come out with a 600-mi truck or a flux capacitor or a wild-looking vehicle, right? A frunk, same bed, same cab. It's about the same range, about the same pricing. It's quite remarkable that we are on par with somebody like that, at this point, and we're getting to market faster. We sure are always cognizant of, there just seems to be such a market demand for us, and now that it's gone mainstream, not just niche, we want to be ready to pounce if the market demand is what we think. We're always keeping that in mind. It would be crushing to have the lead, have the first-market mover and not be able to fulfill. Obviously, you can't just move on a dime in this business, but every decision we make is trying to make sure we can satisfy and take we want as many people buying our vehicle while we're the only game in town, and that will just give us We want to be on version 2.0 when somebody else comes out with version 1.0. Great. Thanks very much, guys. Thanks, John. Next question, please. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mark Delaney with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open. Yes, good afternoon, and thanks for taking the questions. The first question's on the liquidity target that the company articulated by year-end. Can you provide more details on what you're thinking in terms of working capital that may need to be invested this year to support the ramp and also support the sales and operational parts of the business? What's embedded within that liquidity target? Good. Well, I'll start off here, and then I'll turn it over to Julio. We just wanted everybody to know that with no funding, we can get trucks out this year, which again, we think is paramount. We're expecting to receive funding in the various manners in which we've discussed. We expect the ramp to be basically what we had hoped. We have to put the asterisk of, it's going to require us to be successful in our fundraising, which again, we are going to be. The electric pickup truck market, as far as we're concerned, just got a huge boost last week, right? To have our model be almost the same, we feel that we should keep our ramp. With being debt-free, an ATVM loan optionally, we feel we'll be there. We wanted to make sure everybody knew that worst case, we are still making pickup trucks this year. I think the key item of the working capital obviously is inventory. Slowing down the ramp saved us in inventory, but obviously, we need to get working capital financing, that's what we're pursuing. As soon as we get the capital financing, definitely we're going to start ramping up again. Got it. Okay. My second question was on the ATVM loan opportunity. You spoke a little bit about that on your last earnings call. You talked about in the press release today about hoping to complete that in the next few months. I think you said before, this is a pretty extensive diligence process that the government goes through. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what they may have already done in terms of their diligence process and what they may still need to do and where that next few months potential timeframe is coming from. Thank you. Okay. I'll jump in and then let Carter take it. Of course, we've got to be sensitive to their confidentiality. I don't think it's a secret that they look technically at you, they look financially at you, they look EPA-wise at you. They look at market demand for your product. These are senior folks, right? They've been doing this for a long time. I don't think there would be a Tesla if they didn't get this loan back in the day, right? They're very conscious of all of it, and I think it's important to note they have not made a loan in a while. The fact that we're this knee-deep with them is really encouraging to us. I don't know if I'm allowed to say we're optimistic or not. We feel good about it. Carter? Yeah. Mark, just to tie it into your liquidity question earlier, so it doesn't play any role in the liquidity numbers that we provided you with our modified production ramp. They've done, as Steve said, several rounds of due diligence. We believe that so far they've been favorable. We cannot comment on any timing. We believe that we're progressing at the timeline that we originally thought we would, and we're hopeful that we will reach a stage such that we could potentially come to terms, but we can't comment on the timing of the application. Got it. Thank you. Operator, we'll take our first question, please. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Harry Nikel with Wolfe Research. Your line is open. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. I think the first thing I wanted to talk about was just how we think about costs on the BOM going forward. In your first investor deck, you talked about a $42,000 BOM now and a $37,000 BOM in 2024. When you get to 170,000 units. Obviously, just sourcing expectations have changed, you've grown a lot. Can you just talk about how you're thinking about the BOM now, and how you're thinking about the BOM in 2024 and what all the moving parts are there? Sure. Hi, this is Steve, Harry. Just to put it in context, we have probably 3,000 parts in the vehicle, which is very low for a vehicle. 2,000 of them we purchase. Just to frame it up. We're the only full-size electric coming out with four electric motors. Everybody else has two. We don't have things like drive shafts and U-joints and gears and differentials. It's a trade-off back and forth. We make our own motors so that we can control the cost of them. We expect to drive that down significantly over time. We make our own battery packs so we can control the cost of those. We have our cell deals, but the pack's a big part of it, the physical pack. I don't know if you heard on there, but the 6,000 cylindrical cells that go into every Endurance, our goal is not to have a human hand touch those. That, of course, dramatically starts to lower your cost. Did we know all this upfront? We know aspirationally we wanted to get there. We're pleased that we are on course to do all that. Why we don't talk directly about our BOM, I think electric vehicles are going to be less expensive than anybody dreamed going forward here over time because the supply chain is ramping up. It floats all boats when somebody's making an electric air conditioner for somebody that's going to do a million gasoline trucks, but it's an electric air conditioner, so we get to use it as well. Even gas trucks don't like to have a fan belt with a compressor on it anymore, like the old days. All of the supply chain moving towards electric as it starts to become more and more generally known that, n ow that the number one vehicle in the planet is going electric, it just moves the needle. We try to control everything we can that's unique to us, but we buy a lot of stuff and even the cells, of course. I think everybody's aware that cells continue down. We're working on our own cells even, and lots of people are working on their own cells for three or four years down the road. They're just coming down. They're getting safer, they're getting more dense, and they're coming down in price. Everything's moving directionally the right way. I've been in businesses where things are moving the opposite way. Here, price-wise, quality-wise, the number of choices we have and some of the components, everything is moving directionally correct. Electrification of trucks is happening in America. Don't forget, Harry, those numbers you cite were pre-COVID, so it's really not apples to apples to where we are with the industry-wide supply issues. Comparability is difficult at this point. Yeah. You have to hope that's going to level out. Yeah. That's going to subside. Totally. At a high level, maybe the BOM's a little bit higher now. Do you think about the mid-decade BOM materially different from that 37,000 number that you'd given pre-COVID, since it does seem like some sort of pre a lot of these issues? Yep. Mid-decade, of course. What we're doing with our motors and our power electronics that run those, the big costs in an electric vehicle are the drivetrain and the battery, of course. Everything else is not too far from a conventional vehicle, especially now that conventional vehicles are using things like electric air conditioners. I think it's going to be better than we forecasted, but that's just globally looking at the way the world's going. What happened last week really changed. That was a watershed moment. We think it's just going to be two full-size electric trucks for a while, for years to come here, and we're right with them competitively price-wise. The temporary increase from COVID, and everybody, even gas vehicles, all increased their prices this year. We think that'll subside over time. We don't think it's going to have a long term. I think a much bigger driving force than that, the temporary issue of that is these Tier 1 suppliers, there's just more and more of them, and that creates a horse race, and they're competing on price. We're doing as many electric vehicles as anybody in the truck space. The old model where somebody was making one million gas vehicles, but they're making the same number of electric vehicles as us, it levels the playing field a lot. Yeah. No, understood. That's helpful. If I can just ask one more. Obviously, the cash burn's picked up a bit this year. Can you potentially provide some color on how we think about free cash flow break even, just in terms of units or how we think about where volumes need to go for the company to start generating free cash flow given the cost structure, given everything that's going on right now? Yeah. Remember, to keep this, Harry, this quarter, to keep this in context, we do believe the phenomena with the supply chain is temporary. We're not ready to give an update on a specific breakeven target, but we don't think it necessarily differs from what we'd originally thought going into plans because we believe this will subside. Okay. That is helpful. Thank you for clarifying. That's all the questions from me tonight. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Harry. Thank you. Our next question comes on the line of Adam Jonas with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open. Evening, everyone. First question is regarding pre-orders. I believe the last update was in January, early January, when you shared the over 100,000 pre-order milestone. Can you provide an update of where we are today? Yep. Hi, Adam. This is Steve. Hey. I think we articulated that that was a nice round number, and now that the betas were out, we've stopped at that 100,000 and we are converting folks over to what we call now vehicle purchase agreements. I think last time we announced we had 20,000 of those or so. That's up to north of 23,000, I think. These, although it still can't be order orders because we don't have the vehicle done and through regulatory yet, allowed to take orders. They have a lot stickier things. Some of them have down payments in them as we get close. When we got to start spending the money to make the vehicles, we're demanding down payments, things like that. A lot more teeth than the old days. Tom Canepa's telling me I'm a little low on 23,000. It's really around 30,000. Those that around 30,000, they do include some form of a down payment, or some of them do? Most of those. All the new ones do. When we get, I think it's within when we get 90 days from building, right, down payment's due, right? That takes the onus off of us to buy those parts ahead of time and more of a conventional model. Okay. Just a final one for me, Steve. It's a question on providing adequate capital to the company while recognizing the strategic value of your assets, the plants, your tooling, your market position, right? The time to market, all the things you mentioned. I guess if the goal is to add ballast and resilience to the company so that you can ramp efficaciously, and be a strong financial partner that your commercial customers would really rely on you to be to see them through. Right for these work trucks, would you consider strategic alternatives, including potentially a sale of the company, as a mechanism to bring that capital in and crystallize that ballast? Well, we're in a very capital-intensive business. We think we do a great job of trying to do this for the least amount of capital of anybody who's ever tried this before. Again, getting to the milestone of crash test, you just don't see the 50 vehicle companies that have gone before us that didn't make it. It's not because there wasn't demand for their product. It's because they couldn't get this far. I don't think we've ever considered selling the company, but we are in discussions with a few strategics, large strategic investors that of course would bring something a lot more than funding. We do want to be known as. Obviously, it helps float all boats if we are strong financially, right? Somebody buying our trucks knows we're going to be here to service them. Somebody realizes we've got the wherewithal to test these appropriately, which we have with or without financing. We're not putting anything out. We're really bent on five-star, maybe the safest pickup truck ever into the wall. Enough durability testing that we're all confident of how good this is. As we start to get folks like the Army looking at it's starting to be apparent that the hub motors are very, very good. Four motors, of course, is always better than two. The superior traction thing we have, the simplicity we have, we're starting to get now that we're at beta, we're getting people are starting to realize what we're talking about here. We continue to evaluate the strength, and what capital is available to us, the ATVM, for example. I think it's fair to say this is just my personal feeling. There would be no Tesla, if they didn't get that early ATVM loan, right? It was a big one. They paid it back early, and it's a huge success for the ATVM program. That's the best money you can get, right? It comes with a pedigree of the DOE, doing diligence on you to make sure your technology and your market and your everything is good. It's a very good price of money. There's other things out there not as good. In addition to, obviously government vehicles are going to start going electric. Government buys a lot of trucks, so we want to be right in there. Obviously, the $7,500 tax rebate instantly is great for our customers. Carbon credits are a great way to get us off the ground. There's a lot of government help as well. We're investigating all that constantly, evaluating it. Adam, just directly, right? We have no intention of not being an automotive OEM. There are a lot of ways we can take the facility. Different ways we can monetize it. Right now, our plan is still to be an automotive OEM. We will do everything possible to maximize shareholder value, and we'll look at all opportunities. Right now, the plan is to remain to be an automotive OEM. Adam, I think of all people, we feel like there's nobody going to come to market soon with a full-size electric pickup truck. There's no small companies coming behind us. We had a big announcement last week that brought the whole thing mainstream. The number one vehicle is going electric. The other people that make gas pickup trucks have not shown their cards yet, timing-wise. To sell when we're going to be the only two electric, full-size pickup trucks on the market for quite some time. No, selling is not anywhere in our vernacular. Thanks, Steve. Okay, man. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jon Lopez with Vertical Group. Your line is now open. Hey, thanks very much. I have two, if you don't mind. The first one, I'm hoping you could maybe just level set us because there's been a bunch of changes in the metrics you guys have offered these last few months. Number one, what were you viewing as the prior 2021 production target? The commentary you've made today about production, is that only in a scenario where you're unable to get funding? It sort of reads like you're cutting production, but then you also introduced these caveats. Could you maybe just talk about those couple dynamics for a sec? Sure, John. First and foremost, we just want to be clear, and maybe we weren't super clear. We're saying, look, if we don't get any funding, which is not in our thought process, but if we don't, it's always good to know worst case, we might only make half of what we were going to make before. Right? Obviously, we don't want to do that with a strong appetite by customers for this vehicle. To be, again, we're really first-mover advantage. It's proven to be very, very important in new technology like this. We intend to bring capital in one or more of the various ways, and a strategic is really attractive to us as well. We fully intend to capitalize ourselves such that we can make our milestones. Just to refresh you, for 2021, we are at 2,200 vehicles, 2,200 Endurances. The van won't come online till next year, and so we're only talking about this year for most things. In simple math, we're going to be about 1,000 if we don't get any funding. Okay, understood. Sorry, just on the other side of that, if we see an announcement from you in the next little bit that you have secured funding, then we just instantly assume you're back to the 2,200 figure? Correct. Okay, got you. That helps. Sorry, just as an adjunct, I guess, to that, do any of these perturbations in maybe the second half of this year, do they have any of the knockoff effects onto what you were anticipating to produce for 2022 or 2023? I'm not quite following you there, John. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm just asking. Do you want the volume target for next year, John? Exactly. What I'm asking is, if you make any adjustments to your 2021 production, does that knock off to what you could do in 2022 and 2023? It really depends on the timing of the financing and how quickly we can secure. We're not ready to update 2022 numbers right now until we go and check out those different sources and opportunities and see what we can potentially raise, and then we'll update you as soon as in short order and let you know what we think we can secure and then give you a more robust 2022 forecast update. Okay. Understood there. Thank you. Sorry, my second question, I guess that was all one question. The second one is just. I guess you were asked this a little bit before. Maybe I'll try it this way. Given how far above where you thought 2021 spending was going to land, can you talk to us even just directionally about what 2022 and 2023 spending look like? Have you front-loaded significantly more of what you expected over a multi-year timeframe, or is this kind of a new base from which we have to think about the next few years layering on? Good. I'm going to let Rich jump on that, but just as an example, we're building a huge battery pack facility here. Right? We've said, I think it's going to be second largest in the country when it's fully up and running. We're doing that because you just can't move quickly. Let's say we get the funding, and now we say, "Okay, now let's do everything we thought. Let's even do more than next year if we can." We are continuing to keep our powder dry. I think that's the question you're asking. The increased spending, we are trying to keep our hammer, cake, and eat it too, that if we have to pull a lever for funding and slow down a little bit, it doesn't preclude us from doing what we want to do once the funding is there. Some clarity that we should put it on full speed. We just don't want to handicap ourselves if we can. It's not a perfect science, but we are trying to maintain the big stock with the long tent poles, the long lead items. Like building out a battery factory. We are continuing down that road so that we are able to execute in what we want to do. To answer your question pretty quick, John, because of the timing. Sure. Most of 2022 plan is capacitized already for the 30,000. The battery, most of the hub motor, the body shop, the paint shop, and general assembly is already tooled for that. Where we cut back the tooling cost is mostly the body shop and stamping, we go to more curved sets and soft tools. We will have to go hard tools, which will be most of that cost. The frame line and the body shop and the stamping shop is where we have to add the hard tools, too. That'll be where the increase will have to come in 2022. Okay. I got it. Thanks for the thoughts, guys. I appreciate it. Thank you. Operator, we have any more questions? Thank you. Our last question comes from the line of Ben Kallo with Baird. Your line is now open. Hey. Thanks, guys, and thanks for going over. I appreciate it. Just on the battery strategy, could you talk a little bit about, you guys mentioned maybe bringing cells in-house, and how you're evaluating that decision? My second question is just on competition, going back to some of your earlier comments. You mentioned your truck and someone else's out in the market. I think you're talking about Ford. I wonder how you segment Rivian, who's come to the market, as well as Tesla coming to market in that group. Okay. Yeah. Just finally, I guess you probably said strategic 14 x. I was just wondering what strategic means to you all. I think the quick glance would be like an OEM, but should we cast our net broader than that as we think about what a strategic investor would mean? Thanks. I think you're on the right track there. It can be many things. A lot of people are in this business that can help us in some capacity. When we say strategic, we're not thinking. It's not tangential. It's a direct big thing for us as far as help in addition to money. It could be many things. It could be engineering, could be a lot of parts. We have a GM parts deal, which has been invaluable to us. From that experience, we have learned that maybe we don't do everything by ourselves, and there's 100 years of automotive out there and maybe we should. If somebody's interested in investing, this could bring more than money. Sometimes it's worth way more than the money. When I talk about first-mover advantage and there will only be two of us, I'm talking strictly about a full-size work truck. Rivian, from what I understand, is a mid-size truck geared towards the adventure market. Tesla's Cybertruck, we're not sure what market it's aimed for, but I don't think it's for the worker. That's what I mean by that. Then I'm going to let John Vo here talk to you a little bit about our battery strategy, if that's okay. Thank you very much. Yeah. This is John Vo. For the battery cell, we are conducting research and development on that, just like any other serious OEM would have to do. If you look at a story from Tesla Motor, they have all these strategic partnerships with Panasonic, LG Chem, Samsung. Pretty similar to them, we have that, but at the same time, and anticipate what the supply-demand in the future. Everyone know that the demand for the battery is much higher than what the supply can produce. We anticipate that we're not going to be exception to that. That's why we have to anticipate some of the shortage, and we starting the research now so that in a couple year down the road, we don't have a problem. Okay, got it. Thank you, guys. Thank you, Ben. Thank you. There are no further questions. I will now turn the call back to Steve Burns for additional remarks. Thanks, operator. I really want to thank everybody for. I know we went a little over here, but this is a car business, and we're a startup car business, so it takes a little while to explain. I think from our point of view, from management's point of view, of course, we don't like cost overruns. We don't like supply chain that's bouncing around a bit, but that's just part of this business. What we are extremely excited about is strong demand for our product. It's been validated now. Last week's announcement was basically our truck at our price point, and that's a big move to take the number one vehicle in the country and turn it electric. Really, to be this close to production, to be first in that highly competitive marketplace, I hope everybody can appreciate why we're so excited. Imagine entering into the U.S. pickup truck wars, right? It is fiercely competitive. We are coming in with a 75 MPG, essentially a pickup truck that gets that kind of fuel economy. That's a game-changing moment. If I were watching us and trying to figure out if we are on course as we navigate this, to be this close, again, our guesses are getting better as we get closer to production. Since we're cutting new teeth here, a new path that nobody's ever cut before, we think we've been relatively close. The crash test, right? If we had been really sideways on that crash test, it would set us back. That is, to us, the largest gating element. We have passed it, I think that should help dial in what's the execution risk of us actually getting there. I thank everybody again for being on the call, and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks, everyone. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation.