Andrew Brooks ordered three school buses from Lion Electric Co. on Nov. 20, just before American Thanksgiving.
As superintendent of a school district in Illinois, Brooks had been working with the Quebec-based electric-vehicle maker for more than a year to apply for U.S. federal grant money to buy the electric buses. He didn’t realize the company was in financial trouble until after the holiday, in early December.
That’s when he reached out to his contact at Lion Electric, only to discover he’d been laid off. “Had we known … then we probably would have held off on sending those orders through,” he said in an interview….