ARRIVAL Exclusive - Inside Britain's most 'valuable' business | FULLY CHARGED

[Music] right ah that's it done all my deliveries bar one i got one left to do let me just check the map i'd hate to do today one two three so i'm going there all right i'm going to arrival okay check my mirrors digital mirrors of course more efficient very very nice at least the van is comfortable to drive in i mean i've been doing deliveries for years and the old vans of rattling diesel's terrible drive you're mad at the gears and the clutch it's all rubbish but at least with this one so now i'm looking for a rival headquarters i'm on a big industrial estate uh in banbury in oxfordshire let me see if i can find ah that looks hopeful yep okay i'll do it about deliveries there's a big sign tells me where to go perfect there we go brilliant turning circle look at that fantastic that is perfect right let's just check my logistics what's the number of the puzzle yep okay that's all good that's my last package look at that brilliant done all those deliveries now it might surprise you to discover that i'm not actually a delivery driver no that was just my brilliant acting but what we've come to see today is the next developments that arrival are doing here at their at their incredible r d facility it's just amazing what's going on here this is the new arrival delivery van that is a rivals r d center and this is fully charged don't forget our great eb giveaway subscribe and enter for the chance to win one of several electrifying prizes including one of four electric cars [Music] [Music] so mike i'm just i'm i've seen the bus before when we came last year but it was over there and it was basically a box with a lot of wires hanging out it was not that's like this is really i know it's not this is still a prototype isn't it but this is looking really really good yeah look i think that's the first thing to clarify you know it is it's still a prototype and the purpose of this vehicle is testing what we've designed right now it's even a fairly early prototype and all transparency we have later prototypes right so uh don't assess this by build quality and stuff right but it is very representative of the physical bus as it as it will come tomorrow right so i had to say uh it is beautiful i think i think they did a fantastic job on it so i mean it just does look it looks suitably different to you know because i mean you could effectively build have this on the front of a bus with a diesel engine at the back in that in that sense but i can tell that the flat floor that goes all the way through to the back is just at such a really there isn't a massive hump at the back with this hot noisy engine yeah absolutely so within the bus you'll notice so the flat floor is one of the key things right and you'll talk to scott in a little while he'll take you through some of the challenges on that a flat floor has a lot of advantages primarily for the rider yeah but also you can think of just cleaning and such it just comes very easy yeah and you think of what some of our what we're driving for with the bus here is there's kind of three different personas in a way so one it really it does all start with this notion of radical impact right and it's a it's an expression but it really has to stay as a driving principle of it so the bus needs to be compelling enough to get people on it and that's one of the big things and what we'll talk about in a little bit is is it's not just the physical bus then and the technology that goes on it but the the infrastructure around that the services that to start coordinating such but the bus itself the the flat floor uh belies the technical challenges of we have a mandated height of the floor and a mandated hiked off the ground right so there's some extreme challenges to bringing batteries at the floor level what you'll find in a lot of the buses that are on the market today is they're actually in the roof right because they never designed from the start to put them in the bottom they're retrofitting existing so they went wow is that the case so there was already a diesel bus they take the engine out absolutely gearbox and then they put batteries because there's something about the stability of a vehicle with very heavy things on the roof that worries me but i'm a bit counter-intuitive yeah it worries me a bit too so um you know obviously it gives you the modularity then at this point so you know if we talk about like so the first the the writer's experience was a driving principle and that's one of the things that gets you into the bus yeah so unfortunately i don't think we're going inside the bus but you know there's there's a long skylight as an example right very simple change but when you're in the bus big windows on the sides skylight above you makes the experience a lot better you know i used to commute on the bus in sydney and it was a shaky experience the windows were fogged up and you know usually somebody's on top of you really want to make the experience better so that you choose to take the bus so that was a big part of it but little things like the technology you know having usb charging ports and such extras become really important um and you may have seen a corporate video we had was on the the usability team the ux around us the user experience and really trying to stay focused on that and refining that and there's just continuous work on that so uh you know particularly focused around the driver i think the driver is a persona you know we talk about the rider a lot and i think that's really you know the key audience yeah but the driver is the one that spends all day in the bus and it's a big responsibility if you've got 50 people in a bus you're looking after them absolutely yeah yeah we took this bus out for some driver user experience testing a couple months back and when you talk to the driver about their experience it's it's quite a stressful job actually because you have to worry about the passengers coming on paying fares and such but of course you have to worry about what's around you at all times and they were noting to me they said look every eight seconds i'm required to check the mirrors so when you watch them drive they're constantly checking interior exterior mirrors etc so focusing on them was a big part of what we're trying to do a lot of it is simplifying their experience so bringing down the number of buttons and making a user experience that's focused on the task at hand right and bringing only the information that they need at the time which is the exact opposite of my experience on my phone by the way which i get notified on everything so so this is as mike alluded to it earlier this is not the finished article right this is very much what we refer to as the lab bus right and this allows us to develop our technology ahead of the final architecture being ready right so some of the some of the details on this vehicle the industrial design so some of the curves you see on the exterior not the finished final design right some of the architecture has fundamentally changed from this from this platform to our final platform right but but actually this allows us to showcase some of the some of the architecture that we we strive for in the products that we deliver so um although she's a bit of an old girl and actually um she looks a bit rough around the edges she's designed by a rival from scratch ground up nothing carried over no donor vehicle of any sort this is a rival bus ground up and it's really is a stepping stone of us getting to our gamma uh build which is underway uh over there behind you right uh towards slp right you've got to explain what sop is start production proper buses coming up the proper stuff yeah right none of this uh development vehicles the the proper saleable stuff but then so that i love the way that it's it's designed so that you can make it you you know depending on what the customer wants you can make a longer bus or a shorter bus or a bigger bigger or smaller bus yeah so one of the one of the real drivers for us was to make sure that we could develop a platform that was scalable for the customers out there not everybody wants the same bus yeah different cities want different sizes shapes specs and one of the initial targets from our specification was to design a platform that was scalable that was modular and modula is a key phrase that's used in our business a lot and you'll see what we've got here is a 10 and a half meter bus which is your conventional city bus right um hop on hop off actually your intercity would generally be a 12 meter the difference between the two is it's missing a single module between the wheels right that's pretty much it so that is incredible so you actually put another section you can see the different sections another one in there so the wheels the wheels would come back there would be a longer one absolutely absolutely and we developed the product to be designed and and tested and validated to be the the maximum length let's say the worst case right so that we can offer um later on after production we can offer a huge variation in specification and what it really truly means is that we don't need to go back to the drawing board right and that to redevelop the product because somebody wants a slightly longer one a slightly shorter one we've got it out the box yeah but presumably you know from i'm sure all the data and research you've done into what buses really do because it's always that thing where the assumption is oh your average bus it's working all day it does about a thousand miles yeah we're near that is it but i mean that's it's that you've built this with the capacity to to do the job absolutely that absolutely and and you're absolutely right a bus on on the on the roads today everybody just sees a bus and just assumes it's a bus but actually an intercity bus versus uh versus a a town a town to town bus does such a different right drive cycle one gets to 50 miles an hour on a dual carriageway the other one in london rarely gets above 10 miles an hour 10 12 at the time so the use the use cycle of the buses is so different depending on where it's being purchased and what it's been used for and we've we've developed the product to be as flexible as it can be to cater for all of those different uh customers i mean could one of these be you could build what we think of as an intercity bus something that does a couple of hundred miles away absolutely absolutely and and you know there's lots of technology to extend that range and and and to cater for those different customers right the key being here is that we're trying to think about that at the front end of the development rather than trying to shoehorn that technology into it post development right that's what means customers need to wait another three or five years so we're trying to do all that now so that out of the box the products ready for multiple customers [Music] nap i've got to admit to you i'm a real sucker for robots i absolutely love them this is i love this fella you're in the right place then and then they there's all these there i don't even know what they're doing these this is for them my basic understanding is the kind of micro factory the the fact that you can it's a sort of in a way a modular or digital factory that you can produce what you're actually seeing here are two of the main components of the micro factory two of the core technologies the cell and mobile robotics right so in a conventional factory as one you've seen around uh you see that everyone is still based uh around the concept of the conveyor belt yeah right in 150. so the product goes through all the stations in a serial manner this means that you need literally you need one factory for one or a couple of vehicles and a few variations to it so this brings to your massive capex you know to build the infrastructure to build the vehicles and as you know we are looking at a price parity of our electric vehicles with the combustion engine counterpart so we realized that we really needed to revolutionize the way we actually built our vehicle to meet our target right and this is where this technology comes in so instead of having the conveyor belt model um we have this series with this set i would call it of parallel robotic cells modulars which is what you see here now this is one of our rnd ones uh think about it as a little factory inside the factory right so you build a full vehicle inside it or you can build composites panels inside you can be components um and you've got many of these inside the factories and these uh little tanks these cubes these smart cubes are responsible to move everything around in the factory beat like a component it can be 10 bolts that you need to transfer from one side to another or it can be a full vehicle right and these are smart enough and modular enough that they actually can combine to each other to create larger vehicles right so if you have a small part a battery you call one robot if you have a large part a panel a heavyweight transport to make these robots combine to each other like legos so they go along like a train if you are shape-shifting basically depending on what you need uh these robots can create a new creature non-biological creature yes right that is so awesome and i love the fact that they you know you think when you first see it it can only go backwards and forwards but clearly they can go in any direction yes they are how we call them they are autonomic platforms so they can move in any direction without steering right and the reason why we did this is that the arrival micro factory micro because we want to bring the footprint down we want to deploy our factories all over the world with as little work as needed so space is important for us so we are looking at it in any details so in order to maneuver with these beauties into narrow spaces with a heavy load we will think how can we make this happen right how can we get both precision and heavyweight transport in narrow spaces and then the machines you've got here i mean i've seen similar machines in big car factories and everything so that you've just adapted them to so they will each of the modules that these will take up will they do a specific task in the build or could they have theoretically put the whole van together for it yes in principle uh and as technology progresses we aim at building a full vehicle inside the cell right of course uh we we always look for a configuration for adaptability and products can be very different a van a bus so they may have different requirements so some cells may be specialized for some reasons right so you may have cells that are specialized for composites for instance but the the general concept the ultimate uh target is to have a full vehicle build inside one of our cells so patrick i mean for a start the thing i noticed today coming back here a year we were here a year ago is how much busier it is how many people are working there's more people working here there's a lot going on so in case you know there's a lot of noise happening in the background but it's so amazing to see how you've developed this so this is the arrival van that looks pretty different to the one we saw last year it does yeah and i'd say so actually throughout lockdown we've done a good job of continuing on on the critical path we're working on building a lot of vans all out getting a lot of testing underway super important for us um yeah this van you see here is it is different to the one that we saw last time as you say so um we basically the first vehicle was a direct output of the conversation we had with fleets to make a vehicle which was the most efficient way of carrying cargo possible so it was a box on wheels effectively um highly efficient but actually we've had such demand from customers around the world particularly in the us and in other regions for different products which all have very different requirements which led us to a design which is more universal ultimately right so this design you see here we've moved the occupant back and upwards right bigger crumpled zone better visibility better ingress egress um and importantly the ability for us to scale this to different products now far quicker is the reason we've we've evolved the product in this room it's not just like the front is a slightly different the whole is the whole structure of the vehicle most of it carries across uh most of the changes is in the cabin and basic load pass um but it's by and large the same product but we're still managing to maintain the essence of the product which is the most amount of cargo volume over the footprint of a vehicle compared to any other lightweight van and that's that's the important point the cab the driver and the cab takes up a very small amount of the total space you've obviously got a lot of room in the back that's right and designing the vehicle from the ground up as we have we just optimized the vehicle wherever possible so we brought the windshield as far forward as possible and really it's the first essence of a van which which moves away from all of the associations of a combustion engine ultimately so very small front end glass down low visibility is 20 better than any other vehicle so a driver is going to see far closer in front of their vehicle than any other van and it's those marginal gains we can find across the products from designing it the way we have ultimately and then the other aspect now that it's becoming you know closer and closer that there will be companies that will buy i don't know i mean many many vans for one depot is the charging infrastructure at those depots so our company is now going hang on a minute we must make sure we've got the charging infrastructure ready for when we get these vans getting the charger infrastructure ready and then having the conversations with energy supplies to make sure that those fleets can can be ready downstream of that yeah yeah but fleets in my experience are very very clued up on this right now there's very good readiness for this um and of course as you know we've got lots lots of companies companies lots of charging solutions that they can choose from and we're here just to be on that journey with them help them understand what charging capacity the vehicle has what's going to be most suited for their fleets and for their duty cycles there were so many people that we heard from who went who just said i want this as a camper yeah which is kind of predictable conceivably by the end of next year could an individual person buy a van and then convert it to it yeah 2022 2023 we will be taking consumer sales to this point so from private so private it doesn't have to be you don't have to be a fleet no absolutely absolutely this is this is built to be a universal product and consumers need vans as much as as much as fleets do as we know fleet is the right place to start but yeah the demand we've seen for a camper van rightly so as you say is is incredible and so um when you get inside the vehicle you see how simple it is yes and for so roomy for someone who's converted a camper van myself you know what it takes to go through that process and so simplifying the the structure how people can interact with it is a big advantage definitely [Music] so i think what they're doing here at arrival is genuinely it's revolutionary it changes it changes manufacturing it changes the product it's not just about the finished thing it's the way it's made it's incredible i think it's i'm so pleased that we've been able to follow this and we'll obviously come back and see some of the other things because it's possible that they might be making slightly smaller vehicles i'm just saying it's possible so what we've seen today is amazing i really want to thank the wonderful people at arrival who facilitated this it's so wonderful to come and see this uh i haven't even mentioned anything to do with subscribing on patreon i totally forgot because i was so overwhelmed by needing electric vehicles so maybe look at the patreon link if you want to and please do subscribe to fully charged that really does make a big difference for us and that's it as always if you have been thank you for watching [Music] oh [Music] you

Channel: Fully Charged Show

Views: 230,450

Keywords: electric car youtube channel, renewable energy youtube, new transport ideas, green technology review, renewable energy comment, renewable energy electric vehicles, electric vs ice cars, latest news on renewable energy, kryten, ev show, fully charged show, robert llewellyn, electric cars, fully charged, ARRIVAL, UBER, UPS, electric vans, electric delivery vans, electric buses, electric trucks, electric taxis, Arrival delivery van, Arrival bus, UK made, Arrival Uber

Id: 7dYtrncuQpU

Length: 20min 55sec (1255 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021