Charge Cars, maker of the 1967 electromod Mustang, is forging ahead with plans to launch in the US and deliver its first customer cars next year, despite upheaval at its sibling-company Arrival Vans.
“We operate separately to Arrival and we continue to move towards production with the big focus on our launch in California this week,’ chief creative officer Mark Roberts told Autocar.
Charge Cars has made a significant change ahead of the US launch, re-naming its £350k, 536bhp electromod “The ’67 by Charge Cars” to avoid confusion with the Ford-owned Mustang trademark.
Charge Car’s US launch started with an event at the famous Petersen Museum, moves to the LA Show next month, then on to the east coast in New York and Miami at the end of the year.
To beef-up the commercial side of its business, Charge Cars has appointed former Rolls-Royce exec Nick Osy de Zegwaart as sales director.
Central to both “The 67” and the Arrival Van are a shared design of lithium-ion battery modules, electric motors and control architecture, all being co-developed with Arrival Vans.
The two companies are linked by the same major shareholder, Russian entrepreneur Denis Sverdlov, although Charge Cars is run as a separate business with different subsidiary shareholders.
“Denis likes the way we are operating with a lean structure and some of what we are doing is being looked at by Arrival. But we don’t have much day-to-day contact with them,” added Roberts.
Roberts says Charge Cars is moving staff from development and design areas to production as it gears up for first deliveries in autumn 2023. “We need a lot more people on the shopfloor,” says Roberts.
Charge Cars has its own UK factory in West Drayton, while the Bicester-based Arrival is going through a major down-sizing with 800 redundancies and a switch of production to its US plant, focusing its Bicester location on technical development and planning of its unique production system.
Key to the Arrival Van is a new localised production concept, with low-tooling costs, no fixed production line and flexible manufacturing cells linked by intelligent robots, a system that requires breakthrough production engineering techniques to perfect.
The Van’s chassis is fashioned from aluminium, while the body is clad with composite panels and the cab features a large injection moulding.
Arrival has a significant contract from parcels giant UPS for 10000 vans, which had ben planned to be into production at Bicester by the end of 2022
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