Corporate fleet buyers have a rich array of potential choices when it comes to updating their last-mile delivery fleets to electric vehicle technology. The van portion of the market is particularly competitive, big names such as General Motors (with its Brightdrop subsidiary) and Rivian (with its public market status and all those Amazon orders) claimed many headlines this year.
Clearly, there’s a big shakeout to come, especially as these companies are required to actually start delivering on all their big preorders. That’s where UK startup Arrival — allied with UPS and backed by automotive giants Hyundai and Kia — thinks its unique manufacturing strategy will become a key point of differentiation.
Instead of building massive factories, Arrival has created a modular approach to production: It has developed its own chassis, powertrain, body and electronic controls, and standardized those designs into modular components that it says can be assembled and disassembled quickly across its models — and at a lower cost than its rivals. Its EVs will be built in “microfactories” that handle smaller production scales, maybe 10,000 vehicles per year as a start. The first U.S. location is set to come online in the fourth quarter in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“Our method is to have small factories in key geographies. We can deploy for much less capital, and we can deploy as we see demand develop,” Mike Abelson, CEO of the company’s North American division, told me last week. The vans can also be customized more easily for the needs of a specific customer or market. “There is no rule that the vans we build in one microfactory have to be the same as the vans we build in another factory,” he said.