
Hyundai and Kia back Arrival, a British startup making electric delivery vans - rbanffy
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/01/a-100-million-investment-pulls-and-ev-startup-out-of-stealth-mode/
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barney54
This may be the best first large-scale use case for electric vehicles.
Companies can better focus on total cost of ownership than with private light
duty vehicles. The payback will also be better because of the greater
utilization than with private cars. Lastly, there should not be large problems
with charging infrastructure because all of these vehicles return to their
depots at night.

~~~
mrep
They can also probably deliver more packages per hour with how fast electric
cars can speed up and regeneratively decelerate through stop signs and
delivery destinations.

Anyone with a tesla care to comment on how fast travel is through stop sign
filled suburbs compared to ICE cars?

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
Disclaimer: I don't drive a Tesla.

That being said, you really don't want to accelerate forwards quickly because
you'll shred tires, and you don't really want to "decelerate" hard either
because it's not good for your brake lifetime and passengers don't really
enjoy it much.

Electric cars with regeneration are more _efficient_ than ICE vehicles,
especially in stop-and-go traffic because when you don't need the power, it's
not being used. Most gas vehicles still burn fuel spinning the engine while
idling at a stop sign. So while yes, the acceleration may be faster, the real
thing that's gained here is efficiency, because you can recapture some of the
car's energy whrn stopping the vehicle.

~~~
vardump
One thing Tesla drivers keep saying is that they hardly ever need to break.
Just lifting foot from gas pedal is usually enough.

So brakes should have longer lifetime.

~~~
frosted-flakes
Probably not much different from a car with a manual transmission (especially
diesels), where the engine does most of the braking. The brakes on my mk4 VW
Jetta TDI easily lasted more than four years[1], and even then only because
corrosion killed them[2]. So I don't expect there to be much savings there.

[1] The original clutch was changed at 450000 km.

[2] The brake pads separated from the backing, even though they were only
half-worn. Higher-quality pads might have prevented this, but the previous
owner installed them.

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gniv
Here's an article from 2017 talking about The Royal Mail trying some of these
vans. I wonder how that pilot went.

[https://www.wired.co.uk/article/royal-mail-electric-truck-
te...](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/royal-mail-electric-truck-test-arrival)

~~~
Krasnol
DHL has their own project in Germany:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter)

~~~
_Microft
The yellow Post StreetScooters are a common view in my region but as I just
found out, there are a number of variations possible for other use cases.
Interesting...

[https://www.streetscooter.com/de/modelle/umbauloesungen/#pic...](https://www.streetscooter.com/de/modelle/umbauloesungen/#pickup-
umbau)

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dboreham
There always were electric delivery vehicles in the UK, e.g. milk floats.

~~~
m-i-l
"In August 1967, the UK Electric Vehicle Association put out a press release
stating that Britain had more battery-electric vehicles on its roads than the
rest of the world put together... closer inspection disclosed that almost all
of the battery driven vehicles licensed for UK road use were milk floats."[0]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float)

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sloka
Just an aside: Hyundai and Kia are owned by the same company.

~~~
Mikeb85
Hyundai owns 33% of Kia and Kia owns parts of some Hyundai subsidiaries.
Hyundai itself is a massive conglomerate. But yeah, for practical purposes
they're the same company.

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winrid
Won't be surprising when a lot of local delivery vehicles are electric.

In China I noticed many of the vans and trucks of various sizes in cities were
electric (which was kinda scary because they are silent, but it makes the city
more livable). I probably saw electric trucks almost as often as I see Tesla's
in the Bay area.

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erikig
I kinda like how these Arrival Vans look -
[https://www.google.com/search?q=arrival+electric+truck](https://www.google.com/search?q=arrival+electric+truck)

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juanbyrge
I think Hyundai/Kia has a good electric car strategy in place. They have taken
some of their popular models and offered an electrified versions of them. I
bought a Kia Niro EV last year and have been enjoying it. Although not as
flashy or exciting as a Tesla (e.g. no self-driving features), they are
appealing to those who want an electric car but want something more practical
and familiar.

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sh87
Their chief "strategy" officer promises cheap vehicles even if battery prices
don’t continue to fall by setting up "microfactories".

This reminded me of a project I knew from 2016, whose pitch to management was
cheaper running costs by splitting a monolithic application into
microservices. That did not go well neither for the team, nor management.

~~~
heymijo
Both of these could be true. I have no doubt about your microservices
anecdote, but I wouldn't dismiss Arrival's strategy outright because of it.

Arrival may have something in common with Nucor steel and its mini mills.

Legacy steel mills created steel by melting iron. This required a big,
expensive blast furnace that was hard to start and stop.

Nucor recognized that it could use a smaller more nimble electric arc furnace
to melt scrap steel. The timeline we're discussing was '68 so think Space Race
Era. The concept proved successful.

Since then, Nucor has remained successful with its mini mill concept while
other steel companies have faced myriad ups and downs. The technical
limitations of the mini mill have gradually gotten better as well expanding
Nucor's market. [0,1]

Arrival is claiming that:

1) Its "vehicles won’t require things like metal stamping facilities (the
vehicles are made of composites) or paint shops"

2) So that it can create microfactories situated closer to its customers

Regarding Arrival's strategy, I see a similarity to Nucor. Arrival recognizes
a new reality for how it will build EVs that it thinks will allow it to
manufacture differently just as Nucor did with scrap metal and arc furnaces
enabling mini mills.

Is this a viable strategy? I don't know. To decide that I'd need to weigh
critiques from people with industry knowledge.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucor#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucor#History)

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/23/business/the-rise-of-
mini...](https://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/23/business/the-rise-of-mini-steel-
mills.html)

~~~
sh87
Thanks for sharing about Nucor. Learned something new today.

I understand Nucor did 3 things differently.

First it used scrap metal as input and smaller electric arc furnace for
melting. Meant it could set shop near scrap source and sell to local
construction market saving on shipping costs.

Second, they did away with unions with their smaller employee base and could
pay them lesser than their counterparts could pay their unionized workforce.

Third, the mini mill format meant cheaper setup cost and they could pause
operations at lower operational and maintenance costs which again their
counterparts could not.

This makes sense for Nucor.

For Arrival however, given their target is the commercial van market, I don't
see what is backing up their claim to keep the cost of the car low by setting
up shop closer to the customer.

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honopu
I would have loved to see Tesla provide us mail carriers with something like
this. Maybe next cycle, those things get terrible mileage, and do a lot of
braking that could be regened.

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calewis
The Saudi fund that has invested in them has also invested in uber.

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aetherspawn
Punt for this company I work for that operates in this space: [http://sea-
electric.com](http://sea-electric.com)

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mambojumbo
Hope the eu wont come up with ways to make these more expensive than they are,
just to protect german carmakers.

