Poor leadership and over-complex factory blamed for Arrival collapse
Arrival's electric van was due to launch in 2022
Electric van start-up's UK operations are up for sale after 'challenging' conditions prevented it from launching product
An over-complex robot-based microfactory put into operation by “poor leadership” caused the collapse of British EV start-up Arrival, according to an Autocar source.
Arrival crashed into UK administration this week, having never delivered a customer van despite claiming 10,000s of orders and having burned through £1.5 billion of investment (from key automotive players including Kia and Hyundai) on a breakthrough electric van design and a futuristic factory in Bicester to build it.
Sources believe Arrival was condemned from the moment, in around 2019, when top management opted for fully robotised production, which is understood to have pushed back production by at least two years at a time when Arrival had no income from sales, while finding new investors proved problematic.
“You have to make revenue; you have to sell product in this business,” said a source. “They were in a position when they could have gone into production with manual labour-based production. They had the money. But this was absolutely a leadership issue. It wasn't credible to move to robotics.”
The receiver, London-based consultantcy firm EY, acknowledged Arrival’s troubled production "delay" but blamed “challenging market and macroeconomic conditions”. A creditors report due in late March should clarify that.
Arrival was ready to start production around 2020/21, three years after showing its design. It chose a microfactory concept that would localise production to big markets, reducing the carbon footprint of logistics and assembly.
Tooling had to be low-cost and consequently aluminium beams for the chassis/cab and thermoset plastic for the body were chosen – exotic for a van but known technology.
But at a point when production lines needed designing, management pivoted away from a traditional manual labour system to a robot-dominated, unproven system featuring five flexible-manufacturing cells, each fitted with multiple Kuka robots, all served by a fleet of 150 logistical robots to transport minor parts, sub-assemblies and finished vehicles.
There were theoretical advantages, but none of that mattered, as it proved impossible to put into operation.
The robots, for example, had to be developed in-house, which turned into a major distraction. Called Wemo, for Wheeled Mobility, the system absorbed a team of up to 50 engineers for three years - 2019 to 2022 - to invent the system from scratch. Yet at the end, it still hadn’t built a single van.
It certainly looked revolutionary when Autocar visited the Bicester factory in April 2022. The manufacturing cells and robots were on site and the promise was real: here was a start-up boldly stepping away from manufacturing convention.
But despite an experienced production engineering team and intensive activity around the Wemo robots, there was no sign of part-finished vehicles or logistics areas stacked with parts – or, in fact, much of the usual production line infrastructure.
Engineers remained optimistic (as they had to) of hitting the October start of production and 500 cars built by the end of 2022. But a dramatic U-turn was imminent, presumably as management realised that the production process was so flawed that the costs were unaffordable.
By August 2022, the production forecast was slashed to 50. In October, manufacturing activity was stopped altogether, accompanied by 800 job losses. In February 2023, a new CEO announced that UK production plans would be abandoned
While the future of Arrival was in limbo in the summer of 2023, an ex-employee confided to me what most observers already knew: a conventional production line would have had vans rolling off in 2021.
It might not have looked so whizz-bang, but it would have secured the company’s future. However, a fateful management decision taken years earlier meant the dream was over before it ever began.