Lightning eMotors, a provider of medium-duty and specialty commercial zero emission vehicles for fleets, has promoted Brian Barron to chief manufacturing officer. He will lead the manufacturing, vehicle assembly and procurement functions as Lightning eMotors scales to meet its growth targets.
Barron has been the vice president of global manufacturing at Lightning eMotors since June 2021. Prior to joining Lightning, Barron was the director of global manufacturing at Lucid, an electric passenger vehicle manufacturing company. Barron also spent more than 19 years in a variety of key manufacturing roles at BMW Manufacturing Co.
“Interest in zero-emission commercial electric vehicles is growing quickly given the focus from regulatory agencies and corporations on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and we are scaling up our production at lightning speed to meet this demand,” states Tim Reeser, CEO and co-founder of Lightning eMotors. “Brian has a proven track record of building and growing an efficient manufacturing team including the automation tools and systems that we need to accelerate production while lowering costs. In the past six months at Lightning, Brian has demonstrated the skills, experience and leadership we need to drive Lightning into the future.”
Barron will serve as a member of Lightning eMotors’ executive team reporting to Reeser and will lead the teams responsible for manufacturing Lightning’s all-electric powertrain, vehicle assembly across five different platform classes, procurement and supply chain, and facilities expansion and automation.
“We have increased our ability to deliver commercial electric vehicles significantly over the past year, but there is a lot of room for us to improve efficiency, scalability and quality,” says Barron. “By expanding the use of automation tools, we have put in place, such as collaborative robots and augmented reality systems for process control, we can deploy higher volumes of vehicles at improved margins without compromising our high-quality standards.”