As consumers, we’ve come to expect that we can get any product delivered to our front door tomorrow, or even the same day. This was a growing trend even before global lockdowns happened, but being in quarantine has only increased this expectation.
Demand for last-mile delivery is expected to grow 78% by 2030, which means 36% more delivery vehicles will be needed across 100 cities around the world [World Economic Forum]. Our shopping habits are changing rapidly, and this shift has been accelerated unimaginably by the continued effects of Covid-19.
It all points to the fact that on-demand delivery is the norm for a growing number of global consumers, and the range of products for which we default to online ordering is expanding constantly. This growth is having an impact on businesses, consumers and government policy but, most critically, it’s impacting our air quality and our environment.
As long as businesses are forced to choose between using fossil fuel vehicles or paying considerable premiums to switch to electric, our increasing reliance on e-commerce will continue to play a part in the decline of our environment. Transitioning the fossil fuel miles currently driven in our cities to a sustainable form of mobility has great potential to benefit our health and our environment, while improving efficiency and enhancing driver experience.
Industry challenges
We continue to see a positive trend of cities and nations around the world defining targets banning the sale of fossil fuel vehicles. There’s still a lot of work ahead to transition these plans into laws, but a rapidly growing number of businesses are already anticipating the need to make the switch to electric as they transport goods and people.
Yet the current lack of choice and flexibility in the commercial electric vehicle market means finding a vehicle to suit unique business needs can be difficult. Commercial vehicles are needed for an incredibly diverse range of uses, so demands for features like cargo volume, vehicle dimensions, battery capacity, price and drivetrain vary.
Another major challenge is keeping operational costs low while heightening the efficiency of each commercial vehicle. This is combined with a much higher purchase price for electric vehicles, making the move to electric even more challenging.
Businesses might modify vehicles in after-market processes, or wait for new vehicles to be brought to market — but this is costly and time-consuming, and all the while they’re trying to keep up with business demands. The results of these challenges mean that businesses often end up compromising, adapting their usage to electric vehicles’ abilities, rather than using commercial vehicles that are both electric, and suit their needs.
Legislation is a strong push for businesses, but truly widespread adoption of electric commercial vehicles will only be enabled by a sufficient range of vehicles being available, at a price comparable to that of internal combustion vehicles. The move to electric needs to make business sense, so we’ve created a commercial vehicle that’s better financially while being better for the environment, a better experience for drivers, and better for business efficiency.
The Arrival Van
We had three core objectives for the Arrival Van, shaped by socio-economic factors and the environmental context:
- Create best in class electric vehicles that remove the need for businesses to pay a premium as they transition away from diesel to electric fleets.
- Engineer the vehicle from the ground up to deliver unrivaled attributes, features, usability and upgradeability, targeted specifically at commercial vehicles.
- Enable scalability in everything we do to allow rapid and cost-effective introduction of a wide range of optimised vehicles to fleets and consumers around the world.
These objectives, and the urgency of making sustainable mobility a reality, have driven us to solve the challenges we all face in a new way. As a result, we designed a new vehicle architecture and assembly process simultaneously: a new method of design and production. We engineered integral vehicle components and the software that enables them, created innovative materials and ways of producing them in Arrival Microfactories, and developed an ecosystem of products and services for our vehicles and their integration with cities.
As we bring our first Van products onto public roads for the first time, we see the collective output of our revolutionary technologies and their application within fleets. Now in its next development phase, we’re working closely with businesses across grocery delivery, fleet management, leasing, healthcare, package delivery and many other industries to understand how they use vehicles and the challenges they face. All have diverse requirements in how they use their commercial vehicles, and we’ve incorporated features to enable our Van to flexibly meet their use cases.
Over the coming three years we’ll be introducing a range of commercial vehicles of different heights and lengths, and more importantly, different configurations — all optimised to address commercial applications.
Alpha Prototype, Walk-in Van
The Arrival Van is optimised to be the most efficient means of carrying volume and payload on the smallest vehicle footprint possible. Businesses and drivers benefit from the low ground-to-floor height, heightened visibility, best in class cargo volume, a user experience across hardware and software that redefines the standard for commercial vehicles, and the ability to continuously improve functionality for the life of the Van through over-the-air updates.
Arrival Van Products
The rapid introduction of a number of variants of height and length, and different configurations of vehicle, is enabled by the technologies and components created in-house to be used across all vehicles, and by the Microfactory assembly process for which all Arrival vehicles have been designed. This relentless focus on scalability will see the introduction of Arrival vehicles around the world, locally assembled near the businesses and consumers that need them.
A new way of thinking
By designing the vehicle architecture from the ground up, alongside our Arrival Elements such as the drivetrain, battery systems and computing platforms, we’re able to maintain the fundamental essence of this vehicle — offering the largest cargo volume over the vehicle footprint compared to any other lightweight commercial vehicle available.
Beta Prototype, Walk-in Van
We’ve shaped our design principles to bring powerful technologies to reality, and created a number of technologies in vehicle structures, assembly methodology, electrical distribution, materials technologies, controls systems, energy management and others. We’re diverse in our technical and creative approaches, unified by the desire to bring sustainable mobility to cities around the world, and everything we create.
As the environmental, social, and economic impacts of e-commerce continue to rise, we need to be able to scale these technologies, and our vehicle offerings, even faster to meet the broad demands of commercial fleets and global communities.
Our Microfactory assembly process, utilising cell-based assembly technologies with universally capable robotics, removes traditional production lines built solely for specific vehicles and variants, and dramatically reduces the capital investment and commissioning timelines that would typically constrain the introduction of new programmes. Meaning we can scale rapidly, efficiently and locally.
The future of mobility
We’ve begun the next phase of public-road testing, including operational testing with customers — and it’s set to be a busy year as we bring production vehicles to our cities in Q3 2022.
We don’t believe in a ‘one size fits all’ approach to commercial vehicles — so we’re combining our New Method — including Microfactory assembly model, scalable proprietary technologies, and a flexible platform architecture — to actively and rapidly address the challenges faced by businesses in transitioning to sustainable mobility.
Patrick Bion is Arrival’s Chief of Product for the Van programme. For more information on Arrival visit our website.
