The electric bus Arrivalpresented in June 2020, has received the certification of the European Union that allows it to circulate through the cities of the member states and in the United Kingdom for start testing in real environments. The EUWVTA homologation guarantees that you meet all the requirements technical, safety and environmental issues and represents a critical step for its arrival on European public roads.
Arrival is a startup located in the United Kingdom that has managed to carve out a niche in this sector thanks to the investments of large companies such as Hyundai-Kia either UPS. It is known above all for its technology and for the manufacture of components and electric vehicles for third parties. During the last years she has been working on the design of a new concept of electric bus.
homologation full vehicle type (EUWVTA) is based on Regulation (EU) 2018/858 (which replaced 2007/46/EC). It is accepted throughout the European Union without the need for new tests to be carried out on the vehicle and it will be in force as long as the standard is valid or until any part of its design is modified in the vehicle.
According to Denis Sverdlov, Founder and CEO of Arrival, this milestone is key for the company: “our bus is unlike any other that has come before. It uses technologies developed in-house to create benefits for operators, passengers and the planet.” As this electric bus shares many of the technologies and components with Arrival’s electric car and van, the experience the company gains from this certification process help speed up all ongoing vehicle programs, and the startup boasts that this is one of the many benefits of its unified approach to the design of its electric vehicles.
Arrival electric bus
The bus has been developed with the intention of meeting the needs of cities around the world as they transition their public transport infrastructure to a sustainable ecosystem. The interior of the bus has a completely flat floor that gives it a great capacity to vary its composition thanks to the modularity. The parts that make it up can be a floor with high support bars for standing up, a set of double seats, a bench seat for three people or even a mooring area for a wheelchair. The distances between the seats are configurable so that the own bus operator You can vary them according to the route you are going to take or the current regulations.
The bus also includes a set of exterior and interior screens surrounds, adaptive lighting, a transparent ceiling and a suite of digital features. The software ecosystem by Arrival enables full connectivity, digital personalization and remote access to vehicle behavior data.
For now, the power of its electric motor or motors, the capacity of the battery that feeds them and the autonomy or work times it can offer are unknown. The project focuses on functionality and elasticity to offer public transport managers a single bus model that can be configured for routes with different requirements: more standing travelers and therefore more volume of passengers transported in cities, or all passengers seated in the case of trips between towns. When it comes to managing the fleet, counting on maintenance and breakdown times, it is much easier to know that all the units can operate on all their lines, something that also has a significant impact on annual maintenance costs.
Production in microfactories
Arrival has actively worked starting from flexible design, developing an assembly procedure in microfactories, with little production, very versatile and with a smaller ecological footprint. Since setting up a micro-factory costs much less than a traditional assembly plant and employs far fewer people, it should produce significantly cheaper products than comparable electric vehicles and even today’s diesel vehicles.
Bringing production closer to the customer allows vehicles to be adapted to the specifications of regulations and approvals and to local supply chains. They will be prepared for the production of other types of vehicles, so that they never become obsolete: in one period they can produce electric buses and, in another, electric vans for delivery services. By 2026, the British company has set a goal of establishing 1,000 of these microfactories around the world.
Arrival has not yet announced the prices of its products and has not started production. It currently has a central plant located in Bicester, a British town northeast of Oxford, which was launched in March this year. There he is making the 10,000 electric vans agreed after UPS’s investment in the electric vehicle manufacturer. Also, earlier this year, the Korean group Hyundai-Kia invested 100 million euros to accelerate the commercialization of electric vehicles globally.
The company began trials of the bus at a facility in the UK in late 2021 and it was planned start with tests on public roads from UK transport operator First Bus in the first quarter of 2022. According to this schedule, production of the bus should start in the second quarter of this year.
