EV startups collaborated with Foxconn to accelerate production. The wait continues.

The high-profile arrangement with Lordstown appears to be collapsing over a feud about that company’s stock price. But even before that, Lordstown paused Foxconn’s production of the Endurance pickup, citing high costs and quality issues.

Foxconn started manufacturing the Endurance in September, and in January, the company “experienced several new performance and quality issues with the vehicles coming off the production line and vehicles in process” that could be “attributed to supplier part quality shortfalls and software glitches,” Hightower said in a March earnings call.

Lordstown declined to comment for this article.

In the Monarch partnership, the companies originally said in 2022 that “full-rate production” and “commercial production” of the MK-V series tractor were scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2023 but in April published a news release about the production of only five tractors “ahead of full-rate production.”

Monarch CEO Praveen Penmetsa denied in an email that the company was behind schedule, saying the “original plan was always to deliver five units in Q1 2023 with a steady ramp-up of production continuing into Q2 2023 and beyond” and said the company was “extremely pleased with our work to date with Foxconn.”

Monarch, of Livermore, Calif., is also known as Zimeno Inc. The company develops small electric tractors that are driver-optional. Its customers include beer, wine and spirits producer Constellation Brands.

A February 2021 news release noted the “projected start of production” for the Fisker Pear in the fourth quarter of 2023 and described Foxconn’s “exceptional vertically integrated global supply chain and the best supply chain management team in our industry.”

Since then, Fisker has repeatedly announced delays. Most recently, Fisker’s first-quarter earnings call pushed that target production date for the Pear to the first half of 2025. The company is sorting out battery negotiations after receiving the final details of the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits. Fisker has not indicated that Foxconn is involved in the battery negotiations, and Foxconn declined to answer a question about whether it is involved in Fisker’s battery supply chain.

Foxconn acknowledged in a statement that “this is the period of active courtship and acquiring the skills and technologies to gradually ramp up to mass production” and “ours is a work in progress.”

Still, it stressed that “Foxconn is a trusted and reliable partner, including for American EV companies” and said “the EV industry is undergoing extraordinary disruption like what happened with the PC industry 20-30 years ago.”

Foxconn and its partners aim to navigate that disruption in an industry that is even more capital-intensive and complex than that of computers.

“There may be a feeling or an argument that with the onset of EVs, automated driving and infotainment, the car is like a big iPhone,” Semenza said. But “the auto industry is very different from the consumer electronics industry.”