Arrival

Electric commercial van maker Arrival delays revenue until 2024 • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Arrival, EV, TransportationNo Comments

Troubled electric vehicle startup Arrival, which is restructuring its business to develop commercial vans for the U.S. instead of Europe, said Tuesday it doesn’t expect to earn revenue until after 2023. The British company, which has struggled to raise funds to produce EVs using its modular microfactory strategy, will halt operations at its Bicester, U.K., factory to focus on opening a facility in Charlotte, North Carolina. Arrival initially planned to build the van at scale in Europe through a now-shelved $150 million at-the-market offering. Several factors make the U.S. a more attractive climate, said CFO John Wozniak, including a larger market, higher margins, and new incentives of up to $40,000 for battery-electric commercial vans under the Inflation Reduction Act. “Limited resources and the attractive opportunities in the U.S. market makes developing U.S. products the best use of capital,” Wozniak told analysts during the company’s third-quarter earnings call. “But this means revenue and margins will come later, not in 2023.” The company reported a third-quarter loss of $310.3 million, compared with a $30.6 million loss for the same period a year ago. Arrival has faced several struggles — including production delays, a class action lawsuit and wide-scale layoffs — since going public last year in a $660 million special purpose acquisition deal with CIIG Merger. The company finally produced its first electric van, a last-mile delivery vehicle called the L van, in October in Bicester. Last week, the EV maker received a letter from Nasdaq warning it would be delisted if it does not manage to trade above $1 for 10 consecutive days over the next six months. The company’s share price reached $22 at its debut but has traded below $1 since late September. Shares traded at 59 cents Tuesday morning following the company’s earnings report. “This does not mean we’re writing off the U.K. and European markets,” said Mike Ableson, Arrival’s CEO of North America. “We are prioritizing the U.S. market with our current available funds, but we’ll keep an incredible team in place in the U.K. to redesign and optimize aspects about the L van for the new EU regulations.” For the U.S., the company will build a larger van called the XL. “We cannot make money on our current L van product given the cost of parts associated with being on low volume,” Wozniak said. “Each vehicle we produce reduces our cash balance.” The company expects to begin producing the vans in Charlotte 12 to 18 months after raising capital, according to Ableson, a former General Motors executive who will head Arrival’s U.S.-based product engineering team. Many components carry over from the L van to the XL, including “especially some of the high value systems like traction motors and battery modules,” which will shorten the development timeline, he said. As part of the restructuring, Arrival is laying off about 700 workers — or 30% of its workforce — from 2,400 to “just under 1,700,” according to Ableson. Most of those positions are based in the U.K.

Trouble brews at Arrival, TuSimple ousts its CEO and Cruise expands in San Francisco • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in Arrival, The Station, TransportationNo Comments

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the full edition of the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. This is a shorter version of The Station newsletter that is emailed to subscribers. Want all the deals, news roundups and commentary? Subscribe for free. Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. Too much news, so let’s just jump in. Please email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, opinions or tips. You also can send a direct message to @kirstenkorosec Micromobbin’ So much of the conversation surrounding shared micromobility in cities has a negative valence. Coverage often focuses scooter crashes, the devices parked haphazardly on the sidewalk and the congestion of too many scooter operators. But these fail to point out the environmental and economic benefits micromobility bring to cities. For example, Lime recently gave its scooter data to German research institute Fraunhofer ISI, and the organization found that shared e-scooters help reduce carbon emissions within city transportation networks. The researchers surveyed Lime riders in spring 2022 across Stockholm, Paris, Melbourne, Berlin, Seattle and Dusseldorf and found that in each city, if shared scooters and bikes hadn’t been available, a significant number of riders would have taken their most recent trips via car, taxi or ride-hail. The researchers also looked at a lifecycle analysis of Lime’s latest Gen4 e-bikes and e-scooters to measure the service’s carbon footprint from cradle to grave and found that shared micromobility reduces more carbon emissions that it emits. I also mentioned the economic impact from shared micromobility. Two separate reports from Voi and Neuron show that the availability of e-scooters and e-bikes has improved accessibility to high streets and main shopping areas, which have been suffering since the pandemic, and had a positive impact on spending in several cities. The Voi study, which was done by economic consultancy firm Volterra, focused on certain cities in the UK and found an expected increase in retail and food and beverage spend to total £37 million, which would otherwise have been spent online or at out-of-town retail parks. This boost is expected to help support up to 1,400 jobs. Furthermore, the study found that e-scooter operations could lead to a £1.2bn boost for the studied trial areas struggling high streets if introduced permanently as a result of increased food and beverage purchases alone. Neuron’s study looked at the impact of e-scooters on Brisbane, Australia and found that 66.4% of trips resulted in a purchase. Of these, 42.2% of riders made a food and beverage purchase, 32.5% bought something in retail, and 17.9% visited a gym, movie or event. The average spend for each rider trip was $61.05. In 2021 to 2022, Neuron estimates its service contributed $116.6 million in direct, indirect and enabled economic activity towards Brisbane’s economy. Queensland Economic Advocacy Solutions supported these findings and found Neuron’s estimated economic contribution to Brisbane’s economy could rise to $160.5 million by 2026 to 2027. You’re reading an abbreviated version of Micromobbin’. Subscribe for free to the newsletter and you’ll get a lot more. Deal of the week This week we’re just compiling a list of deals that got my attention this week. Let’s jump in: Aventon received backing from Sequoia China, bringing the e-bike maker’s post-money valuation up to $590, from $200 million eight months ago. Miles Mobility, a German startup, acquired UMI Urban Mobility International GmbH from Volkswagen Passenger Cars and with it the WeShare car-sharing business. Neither party disclosed the financial terms of the deal. Miles said it plans to integrate WeShare’s 2,000 VW-brand electric vehicles into its fleet. It also plans to order more than 10,000 all-electric vehicles from the Audi, Seat/Cupra and Volkswagen Passenger Cars brands, which are scheduled for delivery in 2023. Newtrul, which describes itself as the Expedia for freight booking, raised $5.3 million in a round led by SignalFire and Flex Capital as well as previously unannounced investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Crowley, Oren Zaslansky, CEO of Flock Freight, John Larkin, and Brad Hollister. Volocopter, a German startup building electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles, has secured $182 million for the second signing of its Series E round. That’s on top of the $170 million Volocopter raised for the same round in March at a $1.87 billion post-money valuation. Want more deals? A whole list of them were in the subscription version this week. Subscribe for free here. Notable reads and other tidbits Autonomous vehicles Argo AI’s lidar unit, an 80-person team and the lidar tech they developed, is being shopped around by Ford and VW. The two automakers, which plowed $3.6 billion into Argo AI and then abruptly pulled support and shut it down, are looking to squeeze any remaining value out of the AV company. Aurora said in its Q3 earnings it will have enough money to continue to develop its autonomous vehicle technology until its commercial launch in mid-2024 — an effort to assuage shareholders amid a tightening capital market and a week after competitor Argo AI suddenly shut down. But wait! Aurora said it will have to go raise capital; the company didn’t share when that will need to happen. Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt tweeted that its driverless robotaxi service is expanding to most of San Francisco. This expanded area is only available to employees for now. Waymo also expanded its robotaxi service in downtown Phoenix to now include pickups and drop-offs at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. (Technically, it’s to the 44th Street Sky Train station, which is the outermost stop on the airport train and brings people directly to terminals) Waymo’s airport rides, which are only open to the “trusted tester” program for now, will initially use a human safety operator. XPeng received a permit to begin testing its G9 electric SUV as an autonomous vehicle on public roads in Guangzhou. The company will begin testing a small fleet

EV-maker Arrival gets delisting warning from Nasdaq • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Arrival, electric vehicles, NASDAQ, TransportationNo Comments

Commercial electric vehicle company Arrival has gotten a warning from the Nasdaq Stock Market because its stock price is trading too low. The company issued a press release Thursday saying it received a notification at the start of the week that it was not in compliance with the Nasdaq’s requirement to trade ordinary shares above $1.00 per share for 30 consecutive business days preceding the date of notification. The news comes just a couple of weeks after Arrival said it would restructure its business for the second time in six months, shifting focus away from the U.K. market to the United States, where its first EV vans were supposed to be delivered. Job cuts are expected, although Arrival has not come out with specifics on that yet. The company said it plans to further “right-size the organization and cut cash intensive activities” to extend its cash runway, which was $330 million at the end of the third quarter. Arrival has a grace period of 180 days, or until May 1, 2023, to meet the minimum bid requirement under Nasdaq’s listing rules. The company just needs to maintain a closing bid price of $1.00 per share or higher for at least 10 consecutive business days to get out of the woods. If the company can’t raise its share price by May, it may get an additional 180-day grace period if it effects a reverse stock split, or a stock merge, which consolidates the number of existing shares into fewer higher-priced shares. Arrival’s share price was $0.69 in after hours trading Thursday. The EV company went public via a $660 million special purpose acquisition deal with CIIG Merger in March last year. Arrival began trading at $22 and immediately started a slow descent to its current share price. The company has had many struggles since its debut, including production delays, a class action lawsuit against the company and wide-scale layoffs. In early October, Arrival finally got its first electric van off the production line at the company’s microfactory in Bicester, U.K. It’s not clear if Arrival will continue producing vehicles in Bicester. The company has said it plans to open a second factory in Charlotte, North Carolina next year. Arrival told ZebethMedia it would not comment at this time, but that it would have a business update on November 8.

EV maker Arrival cutting jobs again in pivot away from UK to the US • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Arrival, SPAC, TransportationNo Comments

Commercial EV company Arrival is restructuring its business for the second time in six months as it tries to squeeze the most out of its remaining capital. The company said in a regulatory filing posted Thursday that it is shifting its focus towards the to the United States and away from the UK market, where it is headquartered and the first EV vans were supposed to be delivered. Arrival, which went from stealthy electric vehicle startup to a publicly traded company via a SPAC merger, said it will now put the bulk of its remaining resources towards producing a “family of van products” for the U.S. market. It will also put funds towards related technologies such as core components, composite materials, mobile robotics and what it describes as software-defined factories. The move is going to cause considerable pain across the company, namely job cuts. The company said it plans to further “right-size the organization and cut cash intensive activities” to extend its cash runway, which at the end of third quarter, was $330 million. The company didn’t provide specific details on how many jobs it plans to cut. The language the company uses in its regulatory filing suggests it will be significant. Arrival said the restructuring is “expected to have a sizable impact on the company’s global workforce, predominantly in the UK.” The company said it will provide more information at its third-quarter earnings call November 8. Arrival said it will also try to raise more capital to fund the commercialization of these vehicle programs in the U.S. and is “exploring all funding and strategic opportunities” needed to bring the vans designed for the country into production at the company’s second microfactory in Charlotte, North Carolina. Arrival isn’t leaving the UK altogether. The company said it will continue to produce a small number of vans at its Bicester microfactory to support trials with customers. The major factors in the Company’s decision to shift focus to developing its US business included the tax credit recently announced as part of the Inflation Reduction Act – expected to offer between $7,500 to $40,000 for commercial vehicles, the large addressable market size, and substantially better margins. In June, Arrival said it would slash costs and cut as much as 30% of its workforce in an attempt to protect the business from a challenging economic environment while meeting its production targets. At the time, Arrival said the plan would allow the company to meet its targets through late 2023 using the $513 million of cash it has on hand. In August, Arrival lowered its delivery plans from 400 vehicles to 20 and postponed development of its battery-electric buses to focus on vans. Now it appears those cuts were not enough. Arrival had planned to use its existing cash on hand of $513 million plus funds available through a $300 million “At the Market Platform” to deliver the first vehicles to UK customers this year, invest in hard tooling and launch the Charlotte microfactory next year. However, the company’s low share price, which today closed at $0.72, coupled with daily trading volumes meant the ATM was an unreliable source of capital.