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1976 — 2022
1976 — the Electruck: The most forward-looking vehicle in this section was a mail Jeep. AM General's DJ-5E, marketed as the Electruck, was a factory electric vehicle built in 1976, two generations before the electric startups: a twenty-horsepower Gould compound-wound DC motor, a top speed of forty miles an hour, forty-five miles of range at thirty, nothing-to-thirty in twenty seconds, a ten-percent grade held at sixteen miles an hour, and fifty-four volts from two twenty-seven-volt lead-acid batteries weighing 1,305 pounds. On the specialist record, over 350 were sold to the United States Postal Service and five to Canada Post; a secondary account rounds the factory's output to 400 units. Both figures print. The Electruck's assembly belongs to the Dispatcher line of the entry above, with that line's South Bend photograph and its printed cautions.
The negative, printed as the finding: For South Bend proper, the modern electric record is a negative, and it is printed as one: no electric-vehicle production and no electric-vehicle startup seated in South Bend appears in the record reached. The region's electric episode belongs to Mishawaka, and it is boundary-printed here at its size. The former H2 plant — over 650,000 square feet beside the Humvee plant — was sold by AM General in 2017 to SF Motors, a subsidiary of China's Chongqing Sokon, to build electric vehicles; no vehicles ever rolled off the floor under SF Motors. The plant's plan passed to Electric Last Mile Solutions, which proposed to assemble Chinese-built electric delivery vans there: announced for the plant in December 2020, public through a SPAC merger in late June 2021 at a valuation of about 1.4 billion dollars, with a thirty-million-dollar down payment on a 145-million-dollar purchase of the plant.
The first electric van rolled off the Mishawaka line in September 2021. In February 2022 the founders resigned over improper equity purchases made before the merger; the Securities and Exchange Commission investigated; a quarter of the workforce was cut in March; and in June 2022 ELMS filed for Chapter 7 liquidation — the first of the SPAC electric-vehicle startups to fail. In October 2022 Mullen Automotive won the bankruptcy court's approval to acquire ELMS's assets, the Mishawaka plant among them — a transaction the trade press headlined at 240 million dollars, while other accounts of the court papers put the cash and considerations at more than 93 million; both figures print attributed, and neither is this section's number. Mullen stated its intent to produce at the plant. Whether Mullen production ever ran at Mishawaka is not established in the record reached, and the open end is named rather than closed.
Sources:
- Derek Redmond's CJ3B.info and the Electruck's technical record — the DJ-5E Electruck of 1976: the Gould motor, the fifty-four-volt battery set at 1,305 pounds, the speed, range and grade figures; over 350 to the Postal Service and five to Canada Post, against the secondary account's 400 units.
- The Indiana Business Journal and the trade record — the 2017 sale of the Mishawaka Commercial Assembly Plant to SF Motors and its unproductive tenure; Electric Last Mile Solutions from its December 2020 announcement through the June 2021 SPAC merger, the September 2021 first van, the February 2022 resignations and the June 2022 Chapter 7 filing; the Mullen Automotive acquisition approved 13 October 2022, with the transaction figures as the trade press and the court-paper accounts give them.