Arrival Car ride-hailing EV prototype to begin testing next year
Ride-hailing with companies like Uber and others are extremely common all around the US and in other parts of the world. Ride-hailing companies are an alternative to traditional taxicabs dispatched via an app users run on a smartphone to bring the ride directly to wherever they are. In May of this year, we talked about the announcement from Arrival and Uber that they were working to build an electric vehicle designed specifically for Uber drivers to use to carry passengers.
The goal of the project for the Arrival Car was to create the best possible vehicle to deliver the best experience to ride-hailing customers. The vehicle was designed in conjunction with Uber drivers who know what they need to provide the best experience to the passengers. Arrival has announced the first prototype of the electric vehicle is on schedule and will begin testing in the new year.
Arrival is not a massive automotive manufacturer like Ford or Chevrolet. Instead, it is pioneering a unique design and production method for affordable electric vehicles. Rather than relying on gigantic factories and supply chains, the Arrival Car will be built by local microfactories. Automotive manufacturing is very difficult and requires technology and skilled workers to produce vehicles that are reliable and have consistent quality control.
A perfect example of a large automotive manufacturer that is small compared to Ford, Chevrolet, Honda, or Toyota is Tesla. Tesla has found it difficult to produce vehicles that were consistent from a quality standard as the company has been repeatedly dinged for producing vehicles with widely varying quality control. It remains to be seen how well Arrival can produce its Arrival Car using its local microfactories.
Since the Arrival Car was designed specifically for ride-hailing, the goal is to deliver the best experience for the driver and passengers while reducing pollution. One of the biggest negatives for the ride-hailing industry overall is that much of the time drivers spend on the road is without a passenger, and the vehicles tend to spend a lot of time idling.
Arrival has designed the vehicle as an emissions-free EV to help reduce pollution in urban environments, where pollution tends to be the worst and where most ride-hailing occurs. The vehicle has an almost completely glass roof designed for visibility. In addition, the design has twice as much legroom as the average car of the same length to provide passengers with the most comfort possible.
The vehicle has been developed over the last six months with cooperation from Uber drivers. The Arrival Car is purpose-built, and to make the car more cost-effective, it leverages technologies also used in the Arrival Van and Arrival Bus.
Priorities for the vehicle are what you would expect for any vehicle, including cost, comfort, safety, convenience, and driver and passenger comfort. Arrival says the average vehicle used for ride-hailing drives 45,000 to 50,000 kilometers a year. By comparison, the average passenger vehicle drives only 12,000 kilometers per year.
With testing for the car beginning in 2022, Arrival says it will incorporate feedback from the testing into the next phase of developing the vehicle. Arrival is offering no hard details on the vehicle at this time. We have no idea how long it will drive per charge, how fast it will charge, or exactly how much it will cost.
Design Details
Arrival has shared a video, which can be seen above, that highlights some of the design details of its alpha prototype. An alpha prototype is a very early vehicle that's likely to change significantly before production begins. One thing that's clear from the video is that the car was designed as a right-hand drive vehicle for the European market. However, the vehicle will be produced in left-hand drive as well.
We can see from the video that the vehicle has an attractive and utilitarian interior with a large centrally mounted touchscreen that presumably shows all of the vehicle's gauges and functions. The vehicle appears to have no instrument cluster behind the steering wheel where it is traditionally placed. One interesting aspect of the vehicle's interior is that the passenger seat can be folded flat and slides underneath the dash to give significantly more legroom in the rear.
The exterior of the renderings in the video shows an attractive vehicle that appears to be quite small, but it's difficult to gauge the size. The video says the vehicle is similar in wheelbase to a VW Golf or Honda Civic, making it quite small. One of the most obvious design elements is the glass roof that runs from the windshield back, giving passengers the ability to see what's going on around them in a way you can't with a normal automobile.
We have to wonder if that roof is a single piece of glass along the lines of what Tesla does with some of its vehicles. It's hard to tell from the renderings in the video if it's a single pane of glass, but other renderings of the vehicle appear to show that it's a two-piece roof. Production of the vehicle is expected to start in Q3 2023.