Arrival halts work on its bus and electric car projects

British-American electric vehicle startup Arrival is putting its groundbreaking bus and car plans on hold as it struggles to manage its cash reserves. The Financial Times reports that the company, which announced it would lay off a third of its staff last month, will now focus on completing its delivery van. Arrival said it has up to 20,000 orders with UPS for the vehicle and expects to release the first models later this year. This will hopefully reduce pressure on the company's bottom line and boost its share price, which has fallen 90% since going public through a SPAC last year.

The company was unable to comment to Engadget on the FT report as it prepares to release its financial results this week.

Arrival actually started with its electric bus project and has already built several models ready to be tested in the real world. His car, designed to be sold to rideshare drivers, was in the prototype stage (I saw it firsthand last December) and the company had recruited Uber's Tom Elvidge to run the program. The FT report says both projects are in stasis at the moment and will likely be revived as soon as Arrival starts making money. The car project, however, could find itself stuck by the impending recession and that so much venture capital money, which has been poured into transportation startups like Uber, has now dried up, leading to a wave of closures. p>

The biggest tragedy of all of this is that Arrival's focus on the public bus revolution was a genuinely different approach from most EV manufacturers. Buses are found in almost every city, and while it's always better for the environment to use one than a car, making them even cleaner was a great plan. That the public project was frozen in favor of the fleet of logistics vans is not surprising, but it is certainly not a good sign for the future of public transport.

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