This bold British tech startup reckons it can take on the titans of the EV industry
not by scaling up, but by scaling down. Arrival, based in sunny Oxfordshire, say the future of
auto manufacturing is a constellation of its so-called Microfactories, that can be set up
inexpensively and quickly in everyday warehouse spaces close to wherever the vehicles are sold.
Will it expose the gigafactory model as a colossal waste of time?
Join us today for a sneak peek inside Arrival’s revolutionary Microfactory.
Over the coming years analysts Morgan Stanley anticipate 22 trillion dollars
will change hands as individuals, private firms and governments
switch their gas-guzzling fleets over to cleaner, greener Electric Vehicles.
Plenty of companies you already know and love are energetically jostling for a slice of that pie.
But few are doing it with the quite the same counterintuitive approach as Arrival.
Founded in 2015 by colourful Russian billionaire Denis Sverdlov, who made his fortune in telecoms
but started out as a coder, Arrival focuses entirely on all-electric commercial vehicles.
And as early as this autumn, all going well, it’ll be manufacturing delivery
vans for the likes of UPS and public buses for select lucky cities. From 2023,
Arrival will even be churning out these glossy new hackney carriages for ride-hailing giant Uber.
Forget the snazzy design and moodily lit marketing footage for a moment though.
What actually sets Arrival apart is how they plan on making the things.
Since the early days of cantankerous factory pioneer Henry Ford,
car factories have worked along broadly similar lines. Production lines,
that is. Long conveyor systems along which vehicles pass from station to station being
sprayed, screwed, screened and finally shunted out to be shipped to wherever.
The bigger the factory, the more cars you can make,
the greater the economies of scale. Right? Well, perhaps not, it turns out.
Arrival’s big idea is to re-imagine the car factory as a much smaller, but modular and
scalable, product in itself. These newfangled cellular ‘microfactories’ can be set up anywhere,
in any bog-standard warehouse space of a modest 200,000 square foot or so. For comparison,
Tesla’s Nevada gigafactory is spread over 5.3 million square feet,
took two years to open, and isn’t even technically finished yet.
So what actually are the potential advantages of Arrival’s micro-factory model?
An array of smaller factories spread across the map naturally means lower emissions and
costs when it comes to ferrying vehicles from the factory to their eventual point of sale.
Microfactories can be set up on the outskirts of population centres and within months – weeks
even – start cranking out commercial electric vehicles to serve the local market
at a respectable rate of 20 a shift, or 40 a day. As founder Denis Sverdlov puts it,
“you can build vehicles in New York with the unit economics of China”.
Experts suggest the number of vans in our cities will increase by 40%
over the coming years to meet the inexorable rise of online retail. And as governments around the
world impose ever harsher sanctions on the grubby internal combustion engine,
it’s easy to see how Arrival’s market will grow and grow.
But it’s a competitive market. So how can this upstart actually undercut the big boys
at their own game? The answer is clever design, centred around the microfactory..
Let’s look at the very fabric of the vehicles themselves.
The industry standard for vans, as you probably already know, is steel,
which is light and cheap and straightforward to work with, right?
Well, up to a point. Until you consider the fact conventional car plants require enormous
metal stamping machines to scissor that steel into shape. These big,
energy hungry behemoths represent a major capital expenditure for the car giants,
an eye-watering cost that’s inevitably passed on to the consumer.
To dispense with all that, Arrival took a different tack, developing a sophisticated
proprietary composite that’s delivered to the factory in great fabric rolls,
akin to what you might see in a textile workshop. 50% lighter than steel, it also boasts superior
ductility – meaning it’s more likely to bounce back in the event of any unfortunate dinks
or bumps. This in turn saves running costs over the lifetime of a busy working vehicle.
Another nifty feature of Arrival’s composite material is that it’s pre-coloured, instead
of painted. That means our microfactory needn’t splash out on wildly expensive and time-consuming
paintshops. Better yet, because it’s the same colour throughout, not just on the surface,
the material won’t show up ugly scratches and scuffs like regular steel panels.
Arrival’s panels, by the way, aren’t welded together like in regular car plants. Instead,
they fit together with high-tech adhesives – fancy glue, basically – a trick borrowed
from the aviation industry. You guessed it, this also saves on a bunch of costly welding
infrastructure and manpower, with savings that go straight into the pockets of consumers.
Arrival’s ultimate target is to produce vehicles that cost the same,
or about the same,as diesel equivalents, only more sustainable. One of the ways they
do this is making their trademark composite 100% recyclable. So any offcuts or shavings
from Arrival’s molding and trimming processes are broken down and reused on other vehicles.
Arrival’s swish 21st century good-looks are more than skin deep. Its internal design
architecture – remember, these are all-electric, zero-emission vehicles – is straightforwardly
modular by design. This means over the 20-or-so-year lifespan of an Arrival vehicle,
parts can be easily swapped out and upgraded as technology or the end-user’s requirements change.
All components from the seating to the gearbox to the HMI – that’s
‘human machine interface’ or ‘steering wheel’ to you and me – are replaceable
in this way. That not only reduces cost over the life of the vehicle,
but it makes the manufacturing process quicker and slicker. There’s fewer components overall
too. This can only be done because the vehicles were designed from the ground up, by Arrival,
on their unique, flat ‘skateboard’-like undercarriages, which houses the powertrain.
This smart undercarriage is especially noticeable on Arrival’s futuristic busses.
Take any normal city bus. You’ll find, somewhere, usually near the back,
an unsightly bulge which conventionally houses a hot,
noisy engine. Even modern electric buses retain this feature, because regular manufacturers
rarely go to the trouble of reimagining their whole design. So Arrival buses have more space,
flexibility and accessibility options – essential stuff when it comes to urban mass transit.
Modularity isn’t just some buzzwordy gimmick built into the vehicles.
Arrival’s microfactories themselves are conceived as modular clusters of what the company calls
‘cells’. These cells, which are square and measure 20 metres along each side,
incorporate a quartet of robots running on Arrival’s own in-house developed software.
Meaning they can turn their gnarly metal hands to any and all tasks required. A micro
factory can scale up by ordering more cells, or reconfigure their existing cells to meet specific
local market demands. A local bus route needs fewer seats? No worries. Just tell the robots.
These four-armed cells exchange parts around the microfactory via an adorable fleet of AMRs,
or Autonomous Mobile Robots. These natty little tanks ferry parts between the cells.
They’re holonomic – that means they move in any direction – and are powered
by sophistical AI software helping them adapt to any space. Even cooler,
they can join up like Lego when they need to tackle really heavy loads.
Ultimately, this is about making microfactories cheap and easy to
set up, and so they occupy the smallest footprint possible.
By the way, it’s reckoned a regular car factory can cost as much as a million
euros per square foot. An Arrival microfactory only costs tens of thousands per square foot,
and it’ll get up and running quicker.
Ultimately, microfactories are a challenge to the conventional wisdom that manufacturing is
best outsourced to gigantic foreign plants and dragged over oceans.
On the microfactory model, local people are employed, and local taxes paid,
manufacturing vehicles tailored for a distinctively local market.
You’ll see their products in the wild soon enough,
if you happen to live around oxfordshire or the Carolinas where the first microfactories
are whirring into life as we speak. And it can’t be overstated how Arrival’s 10,000
van contract with UPS – with thoughtful bespoke features like doors that open easily for drivers
laden with packages – represents a significant shift in how organisations spend on logistics.
So UPS, a new-minted bus partnership with Hitachi,
that UBER ride-hailing car, and the backing of big money from the likes of Hyundai,
KIA and Blackrock, suggest the future is well and truly scheduled for Arrival.
What do you think? Is local, artisanal heavy industry the way forward? Let us know in the
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