Screenshot from Lightning eMotors Investor Presentation dated June 17th, 2021 ( ppt). They put together a handy chart in their latest investor deck that effectively communicates where they currently play and why they believe they can be successful in these niches. Vehicles like Class 3 cargo vans, Class 5 and 6 box trucks, and transit bus repowers have all proved to be low hanging fruit for Lightning eMotors. This enables the company to drive scale where possible in common areas like powertrains, battery modules, inverters, and power electronics, without getting stuck in the weeds building one-off vehicles for customers. Lightning eMotors plays in a very interesting space in the electric commercial vehicle segment by building a team that’s good at developing vehicles they can cost effectively build in the tens of thousands per year. They currently have an order backlog of 1,600 vehicles which will take them about a year to build based on their current capacity.

Those same customers have said they’re going to continue make repeat orders and transition our fleet.” “This growth is being driven by existing customers making repeat orders. “We see that kind of growth being sustainable over the next several years,” Reeser said. In the last year, they have seen a staggering 600% growth in orders and 600% growth in deliveries and Tim believes that growth is sustainable for the coming year. Improved prices have translated to meaningful growth for Lightning eMotors. “We’ve been able to share in the fact that Tesla got enough volume up there to drive the price down on some of these components.” The sharp drop in upstream component prices was driven by the tidal shift in the electrification of the broader automotive industry. “We started to see cost reductions in batteries driven by the automotive volume that’s happening,” Tim said. “Over the last year, those of us in the space have seen prices coming down and volume going up,” Tim said. As a result, customers ordered even more products, driving purchasing volumes up, resulting in even better numbers. The single biggest variable was the price of upstream components from suppliers going down, leading to better ROIs for customers. Thankfully, Tim believes the industry just moved past this critical tipping point in the last 12 months. If customers will make less money in an electric vehicle than a comparable internal combustion vehicle, developing a sustainable pipeline of orders is difficult.

It is a beast of an undertaking but, after years of building their team, developing capability, finding suppliers willing to invest in electric vehicle components, and finding what feels like the perfect home in a massive campus with room for them to grow into, Lighting eMotors has emerged as the dominant player in the space.ĬEO Tim Reeser explained to me that a key enabler for the entry of commercial electric vehicles into the mainstream is very simply the return on investment.

Lightning eMotors’ bread and butter is their ability to identify and quickly develop scalable electrified builds of niche vehicle segments in the commercial space, spanning from Class 3 transit vans all the way up to fully electric Class 6 box trucks. I have no formal training driving a vehicle that large and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was very easy to drive and thankfully, we made it back to the factory with everyone we left with.

I drove the Class 6 box truck last time I visited so I volunteered to drive the team of analysts around in a massive shuttle bus. The call provided a forum for institutional financial analysts to hear from the Lightning eMotors leadership team and ask questions about the newly listed company (trading under ticker symbol: $ZEV).Īfter the analyst call, attendees had a chance to tour the newly expanded factory, talk with the Lightning eMotors team and even take their electric vehicles for a spin around the parking lot. The day kicked off with an informative, live streamed analyst call that provided a solid grounding in the company and performance, with the usual forward looking statements rolled in. Lightning eMotors has been cranking out high quality electric vehicles for years now and shortly after going public, hosted a range of customers, analysts, and media at Lightning Day 2021 at its Loveland, Colorado factory.

Lightning on a clear day