Britain’s Tesla hopes for big things from ‘microfactories’

theguardian.com:

The last year has been tricky for electric vehicle startups. After a burst of investment mania in which companies raised billions on the mere promise of battery propulsion, valuations have come back down to earth.

One of the loudest thuds has come from Arrival, the closest to what could be called a British electric vehicle champion. Its market value on the Nasdaq has fallen from $15bn (£11.6bn) in March 2021, when it first completed a merger with a listed cash shell, to about $1.75bn.

Almost all its startup rivals have suffered similar plunges, but Arrival is arguably a special case. The company is trying to move fast – launching a van, a bus and a car at the same time – and break the traditional industry model, using robot-controlled “microfactories” that it hopes will bounce manufacturers from the Henry Ford age to the iPhone era.

The UK is key to those ambitions, and Arrival – founded by Russian entrepreneur Denis Sverdlov, incorporated in Luxembourg, listed in New York, but with research and development in the UK – is in turn an appropriate symbol for the hopes of the British automotive industry.

Its first products are being developed in Banbury and built in Bicester, both in Oxfordshire, and the company wants Bicester to be the model for microfactories across the world. Now it just needs to make the thing work. That is proving harder than expected: delays mean it has had to halve forecasts for this year to 600 vans.

“There are all sorts of people who are wondering if the microfactory will work,” says Mike Abelson, chief executive of Arrival Automotive, speaking from the Bicester shed, where half-wrapped robot arms stand poised to start work. “The only way to prove that is to produce the vehicles. We’ll be doing that this