Arrival’s secret sauce for taking electric vehicles mainstream

2030 sounds like a long time away, 2040 even further. However if you consider that The Great British Bake Off and Instagram are both 10 years old, the iPhone is 13, Suri Cruise is 14 and Home Alone is 30; suddenly 2030 and 2040 seem all too near.

Propelled by the VW scandal in 2015, these are the dates that governments around the world have pledged to stop selling petrol and diesel vehicles. By today’s standards that means selling 90 million more electric vehicles annually, up from the 2 million presently sold each year.

It is no wonder then that the past 5 years have seen an eruption of EV startups leap onto the global stage. Each EV startup has come armed with promises to operate with greater agility than their OEM counterparts. Whilst both OEMs and EV startups alike are aware of the huge challenge and opportunity making electric vehicles at scale and against the clock represents.

At first glance Arrival may seem no different. Founded in 2015, like many of its competitors, it is making electric vehicles, has received notable investment and attained unicorn status. In spite of its backing from globally renowned customers, it only takes a single look at the Arrival Van to understand that the company is doing something radically different.

Arrival’s trajectory has been shaped by answering two questions.

1. How can we make electric vehicles at the scale and cost that enables mass adoption for everyone, everywhere?
2. Why in 2015 are we settling for vehicle experiences that don’t match our expectations of all other technology we use in other areas of our lives?

Introduction of new vehicle technology typically starts in the luxury sector so that the additional cost of R&D and new components can be hidden behind a luxury price tag. Given the high cost of batteries today, electric vehicles have been no exception and remain unaffordable to most drivers. Arrival felt this was unsustainable and resulted in the commercial vehicle sector being underserved.
Instead, it looked to the market with the most pressing need to make the EV switch, and build a solution that matches the price point of the diesel vehicle currently employed by that market. The answer - commercial vehicles and more specifically, 4T Vans and Buses.

In the UK, 1 in 10 people use a van for their work, whilst every single person worldwide directly depends on a job that uses a van. Coronavirus has brought this even more acutely into perspective, fuelled by the plethora of online deliveries being fulfilled during lockdown.
Making an electric van or bus for the same price as its ICE equivalent is no small feat. Achieving that without depending on government incentives or a lower cost of ownership to make the price more palatable, is an even larger feat.

Arrival felt that if it can’t reduce the battery cost today, it needs to rethink everything else that goes into making a vehicle in order to make it cheaper overall. This prompted the advent of Arrival’s new method - a revolution in the way that vehicles are designed and assembled. This meant developing new proprietary lightweight, low cost composite materials to replace steel and aluminium body panels. It also meant creating its own components which, modular in construction, fit together in perfect tetris like formations. Perhaps most interestingly of all, it meant inventing an entirely new method of manufacturing. Arrival calls these Microfactories.

Traditional vehicle factories are enormous. Their sprawling enormity comes at a huge cost that takes 100s of thousands of vehicle sales to recoup, volumes that make even the most mighty of OEMs wince. Microfactories by comparison are a fraction of the size and an even smaller fraction of the cost. At €20 million and decked with sleek robotic bays, they can be placed almost anywhere and importantly, as close to the end users as possible.

The beauty of this approach is that Arrival doesn’t need to sell vast volumes of a particular model to be profitable. Instead a microfactory can create products that are tailored for the local community, accommodating even the smallest of cultural nuances. Distributed manufacturing can use localised supply chains ensuring that Arrival’s EVs don’t just benefit the local environment, but the local economy too. Today there are 2 microfactories with many many more in the pipeline.

As for question two, why are we settling for vehicle experiences that don’t match our expectations of all other technology we use day to day? This is the trap that most automotive companies have fallen into. Traditional vehicles take 5-7  years to develop meaning that technology that is novel at inception feels archaic by launch.

Arrival will avoid this trap by equipping its vehicles with software enabled hardware which, like a phone, can be upgraded and updated throughout its life. Arrival’s vehicles are finally the embodiment of a “device on wheels”.
However, Arrival’s magic is more than apps and seamless connectivity. There is a certain feeling you get when you look at one of its vehicles that is only amplified when you sit behind the wheel. It’s a feeling that doesn’t translate into quantifiable metrics, rather a visceral awareness that the vehicle is so intuitive that it just makes a tremendous amount of sense. The design and usability of the vans and buses have solved problems drivers probably didn’t realise they had, as well as the ones they definitely knew they did. They are considered and refined and well, beautiful.

I never thought I would ever describe a bus or a van in such terms, nor would I believe that commercial vehicles could be capable of such impact. But it seems everything that Arrival does is set up to catapult expectations and establish new benchmarks.

Vans and buses are the tip of the iceberg, 2 microfactories just the beginning. Electric vehicles will soon be a universal reality, and Arrival is fundamental to making it so.

Pictures: Arrival
Text: Imogen Pierce