Commercial startup EV Arrival’s business continues to unfold.
The arrival was announced on Monday in a regulatory filing that the UK division is going into administration, the country’s version of bankruptcy. The troubled company, which will go public in 2021 through a merger with a special-purpose buyout firm, said it wants to sell its UK assets and intellectual property in order to repay lenders that helped it stay afloat.
The push to management comes just a week after Nasdaq announced it was delisting the startup’s stock and just under a year after Arrival raised a $300 million bailout in an effort to turn the business around.
Arrival says other subsidiaries outside the UK will continue to operate, but the company did not explain what that means. More than 170 jobs are at risk in the UK alone, according to the Financial Times.
Once valued at more than $13 billion and backed by Hyundai and UPS, Arrival made big claims about how it was going to revolutionize the way electric vehicles are built. Today, Arrival is valued at around $9 million.
Central to its EV vision was the manufacture of electric commercial trucks and buses in highly compact “micro-factories” that could be located in city centers. Those plans never came to fruition as the company continued to cash in while undertaking a wide range of projects such as an electric bus and a custom-built car for Uber. Arrival has also fired a number of executives and restructured at least three times, laying off workers each time.
In 2022, Arrival shifted its focus to the United States and away from the UK market, where it is based and where the first EV vans were supposed to be delivered. The spin-off was part of a restructuring aimed at preserving capital. However, this has also declined with Arrival failing to produce and deliver commercial vehicles.
