I'm Rob Thompson, Chief of Materials at Arrival.
The way it began was Denis was really clear at the start, he was like 'with everything that you know, how would you build a vehicle now and what's
really exciting in the world of materials?' And so that's where we started from, we just dug into where all the development was, where robotics was
going and where polymer chemistry was being developed, where recycling was strongest. We looked at all the key players and all of the opportunities
that presented themselves.
The brief was really clear from the start. How do we build vehicles at price parity with the conventional diesel vehicle? Now what that means when
you're putting a large, expensive heavy battery into a vehicle is that you need to make the body system lighter and lower cost. We rethought the
vehicle architecture and rethought the materials to create something genuinely new.
We've taken a completely different approach, a radical approach to how we make our vehicles. So we're using distributed Microfactories and that means
that we needed to develop materials and processes that could fit that model.
So we needed
to do away with the big heavy expensive steel stamping tools, paint lines, welding lines, these things that cost billions to set up and are with a
company for years, decades even, we wanted to establish a very nimble and agile approach to manufacturing. You have to develop the material and the
process together to achieve the Microfactory model. If you were setting up a production line for a conventional metal standard car and you're looking
at something like a million euros a square metre for the tooling and a 12-month lead time. Now with our process, we've got that lead time down to
just a few weeks. And our tooling investment is tens of thousands instead of millions. So we can turn around products very quickly, we can go from
prototype to production very quickly, and it really supports this Microfactory model.
So everything starts from a fabric, all that we're doing is fabric based. And like that in itself is fundamentally new. We're trying to build all of
the performance that we want in the finished material into fabrics. And so what we're doing is we're mixing the garment industry, conventional textile
industry at automation, and we're bringing those things together. And so we're finding this in a really nice serendipity in some places that, you
know, we just wouldn't have discovered if we weren't mixing these different industries together. And it's gotten to the stage where we we bring rolls
of fabric into the factory, and we deliver finished panels to the vehicles at the other end of the factory.
My name is Jon Steel, and I'm the Head of Sustainability at Arrival.
Our composite materials are fully recyclable. So any waste that's generated during the process can be reused and recycled into new products. We're
doing this from the two kinds of sources of waste. There's materials that come from off cuts from the ply cutter and there's materials that come from
the trimming process, once the material has been moulded. Both of these materials have the potential to produce new components for vehicles or they
could be reused in other applications.
If you were to take a conventional steel panel and compare it to ours, then we're less than half the weight. If we take one hundred and 25 kilos out of
a conventional body system, then that equals something like ten kilometres range per charge, or about 800 kilos of CO2 in the lifetime of a vehicle.
So through this material development, we're making a significant impact on the sustainability of the vehicle.
And what we can do with a composite material that you can't do with monolithics like metals, is that we can build in additional strength where
we need it. We have far higher ductility. So in a low speed impact, where you'd expect to have to replace the metallic body system, our panels
actually bounce back from that and don't require replacement. So rather than having to repair or replace, our panels actually survive much longer
out in the field. So massively reducing the potential repair bills for our customers.
I've worked on material development for a long time, and
you have to have a lot of faith in the opportunities that materials present and it takes a certain type of culture to understand the opportunities of
that. There's very few places in the world where you could do the sort
of work that we're doing,
and at Arrival, the collaboration between the teams, the trust between the teams, it's unlike anywhere else that I've been and it means that
innovations like this, they can they can really thrive and the whole organisation gets behind an opportunity, whether it be an engineering
opportunity or material development or robotic solution, and they help bring that
to life.