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We’ve all become a lot more reliant on their services with the shops closed, and it’s likely that will remain a semi-permanent change in the way that we do a lot of our shopping.
But there’s an environmental cost to all those deliveries – tens of thousands of noisy, polluting trucks and vans trundling along residential streets, just when we’re starting to spend more time in those streets during the day ourselves. It’s not ideal, and efforts to electrify commercial vehicles have been slow. That’s a problem, because almost a quarter of emissions from the transport sector come from medium-sized and heavy-duty trucks.
Arrival is looking to change that. The Oxfordshire-based company recently unveiled its design for an all-electric van, for which it’s just had a major £339m order for 10,000 units from logistics giant UPS, and is looking to expand to a second production site in Bicester from 2021.
Built in microfactories
The company is unique in its use of ‘microfactories’. These are small, low-cost production facilities that use a cell-based assembly method instead of a traditional automotive production line. This means that they can be deployed more quickly, using existing commercial spaces, rather than large custom-built factories.
By sourcing materials locally and tweaking the design to meet local requirements, the company can reduce the environmental impact of manufacturing. “Deployment in smaller, standard buildings dramatically lowers the capital required to build a microfactory to tens of millions of dollars from the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars required for the traditional assembly plant,” said the company. “The lower capital outlay contributes significantly to our ability to lower the price of Arrival commercial vehicles.”
That did require a lot of engineering, as most components on the market are not compatible with cell-based manufacturing. So the company has to design and build everything in-house, from battery modules to gearboxes, to a unique grid-based design that enables easy robot assembly. This modular approach means the same components can be used across Arrival’s entire vehicle line, from buses to the delivery vans of the future.
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