Mechanized multitaskers
Electric vehicle startup does away with assembly lines, but will ‘microfactories’ deliver?
A small electric vehicle company backed by UPS wants to replace the assembly lines automakers have used for more than 100 years with something radically different — small factories employing a few hundred workers.
The company, Arrival, is creating highly automated “microfactories” where its delivery vans and buses will be assembled by multitasking robots, breaking from the approach pioneered by Henry Ford and used by most of the world’s automakers. The plants would produce tens of thousands of vehicles a year. That’s far fewer than traditional auto plants, which require 2,000 or more workers and typically produce hundreds of thousands of vehicles a year.
The advantage, according to Arrival, is that its microfactories will cost about $50 million rather than the $1 billion or more required to build a traditional factory. The company, which is based in London and is setting up factories in England and the United States, says this method should yield vans that cost a lot less than other electric models and even today’s standard, diesel-powered vehicles.
The company hopes its electric vehicles will disrupt the normally sleepy market for delivery vans. Such vehicles are well suited to electrification because they travel a set number of miles a day and can be charged overnight. Arrival has already won over UPS, which has about a 4% stake in the company and plans to buy 10,000 Arrival vans over the next several years.
In Arrival’s factories, a motorized platform will carry unfinished vehicles among six different robot clusters, with different components added at each stop. The company is also replacing most steel vehicle parts with components made from advanced composites, a mix of polypropylene — a polymer used to make plastics — and fiberglass. These parts are to be held together by structural adhesives instead of metal welds.
The use of composites, which can be produced in any color, would eliminate three of the most expensive parts of an auto plant — the paint shop, the giant printing presses that stamp out fenders and other parts, and the robots that weld metal parts into larger underbody components. Each typically costs several hundred million dollars.
Arrival, which in March began trading on the Nasdaq exchange, hopes to start producing buses by the end of this year, but its ideas remain unproven. Automating auto plants is notoriously tricky. Tesla blamed overreliance on robots for the troubled start of its Model 3 production line in 2018.
Manufacturing robots are usually programmed to do one or two tasks. Arrival is counting on its robots to handle a variety of jobs.
UPS has been working with Arrival almost since the startup’s founding, said Luke Wake, vice president of maintenance and engineering in the UPS corporate automotive group.
The shipping giant has helped design a delivery van that affords greater visibility for drivers than a traditional truck and is easy to load and unload.
While he acknowledged that Arrival’s untried approach to producing trucks posed a risk, he said it could accelerate the use of electric vehicles in the package delivery business.