The Lion Electric Company (LEV)

The Lion Electric Company was a Canadian manufacturer of all-electric medium and heavy-duty vehicles. Its best known products were electric school buses, which it sold to school districts across Canada and the United States, along with electric trucks for urban delivery and municipal use. The company designed its own chassis, battery packs and drivetrains. It positioned itself as a pure-play electric vehicle maker in the commercial segment.

Lion was founded in 2008 and is based in Saint-Jerome, Quebec. It went public in May 2021 by merging with Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company, and listed its shares on both the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol LEV. The company then built a large battery plant in Quebec and a vehicle assembly plant in Joliet, Illinois, partly in anticipation of U.S. federal funding for clean school buses.

Demand and funding timing fell short of expectations, and the company burned through cash while carrying significant debt. Lion cut staff, scaled back its U.S. operations and warned about its ability to continue as a going concern in 2024. Its share price fell steeply and lenders' patience ran out by the end of that year.

On December 18, 2024, Lion and its subsidiaries applied for creditor protection under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act in Quebec, with Deloitte appointed as monitor. The NYSE suspended trading the same day and its common shares and warrants were removed from listing effective January 21, 2025. The business was later sold through the court-supervised process, leaving little or nothing for public shareholders.