Ahead of our chat with Avinash next week, which we’ll record and share afterwards, we’re taking questions from the community, and we’ll prioritise the most-liked questions.
Drop your questions below for our call with Avinash by 14th March
Update: here’s the AMA call, thanks for your questions!
This should not be read as personal investment advice and individual investors should make their own decisions or seek independent advice. When you invest, your capital is at risk.
Thanks Freetrade for making this happen, hopefully the first of many!
I have two questions for Mr Rugoobur:
How confident is Arrival of achieving higher than average margins using micro-factories? While I appreciate the production process is unique, how can you eliminate the various costs that come with this approach (say, administering 10 microfactories seems like it will be more difficult than administering one large one) without the economies of scale your competitors will have? Your advantages like no metal stamping, paint shop, automation all seem very compatible with larger facilities, and surely there is a (operational as well as a financial) limit on how many factories can be built simultaneously?
Its nice to see your ethos to vehicle longevity with upgradeable components and recyclability. How easy is the recycling process - will you be doing it all in-house (ie. receiving EoL parts and making yourself new panels)? And I guess following on from that are you open to licensing your composite technology?
A lot of recent EV SPACs have been understandably criticised for going public long before they are ready to generate revenue. When do you expect the first sales revenues to start registering at Arrival?
What is your approach to battery cell supply and how secure is this? Is it LG Chem to supply the cells to be assembled into packs in house at Arrival or something else?
Arrival has been targeting vertical integration of the product from what can be found in the media.
Could you, please, share your view on the current battery landscape? Where will your batteries be produced? How is your cost per kWh stands compared to the industry average in 2020 ( ~$157/ kWh)
I like their product range but also thinking is social distancing really worth taking into consideration? Its a once in a lifetime event and potentially an extra cost/production difficulty to the manufacturing process that isn’t really worth adding.
Not knocking the importance of the whole virus issues but do think some companies are investing in precautions that wont ever be used whilst being a cost burden long term.
Alot of companies are very keen to support the roll out of electric vehicles but what are your company doing to work with network operators and or developers to improve the roll out of the necessary infrastructure to further support the growth of electric vehicles?
Can you make a camper version of your electric van?
Thanks for fielding questions and great timing with Industry 4.0.
I don’t have any questions specifically for Arrival but I was wondering how long you think consumers will have to wait until micro factories become small enough to replace the local mechanic with a small robot workshop that has machine learned how to replace suspensions assuming that this is possible and thus inevitable? Related, is whether you think micro-factories will lead to open source designs led by well funded foundations acting on behalf of logistic companies?
Also, in general, I am wondering why deep tech companies avoid crowd funding. I didn’t see Arrival go this route, so maybe you have an opinion. It seems that genuine companies (not the badly thought through ones) that do go to the crowd raise millions in seconds/minutes (Freetrade, Revolut, Monzo, What3Words, Nothing, etc). I would have thought that Arrival could have raised 10 million+ in no time.
