Technology US

Canoo’s electric van will start at $34,750

California EV startup Canoo has finally announced pricing for the electric van it announced back in 2019. The “lifestyle” van, as Canoo calls it, will start at $34,750 and cost as much as $49,950 for the most capable model, before additional equipment or tax incentives.

Canoo has also started accepting $100 deposits for the van as well as for the electric pickup truck it revealed in March and the delivery van it debuted late last year. Pricing was not given for the pickup, though Canoo has said the base price for the delivery van will be $33,000. Canoo’s lifestyle van is slated to go into production sometime in 2022, though it won’t start production on the other two vehicles until at least 2023.

All three vehicles are built on the same modular electric vehicle platform that Canoo has been developing for a few years. In the largest configuration, with an 80kWh battery pack, the lifestyle van should get around 250 miles of range. Canoo also says it will sell the van in four different trims, including an “adventure” version with more ground clearance and “a more muscular profile.” Exactly who will build the van remains a mystery; Canoo has said it will tap a contract manufacturer, but it has not formally announced one yet.

Originally called Evelozcity, Canoo was founded in late 2017 by a group of executives and engineers who split off from EV startup Faraday Future, which was struggling mightily at the time. They created the van but also tried to license out the platform it’s built on to other automakers and companies looking for a quick solution to bringing an electric vehicle to market. Canoo signed a deal with Hyundai to build vehicles on the platform in 2020 and to provide some engineering services to the automaker. And as The Verge first reported in January, Canoo even held talks with Apple about using its electric vehicle platform.

That founding group’s original goal was to offer the electric van on a subscription-only basis, but a lot has changed at Canoo in the last year. The startup merged with a special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC) and is now publicly traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange, raising some $600 million in the process. Canoo’s leadership has also been overhauled. Tony Aquila, a businessman who came in as an investor near the start of the SPAC merger process last year, became Canoo’s executive chairman and is now also its CEO after one of the startup’s founding executives resigned in April.

Aquila has focused Canoo more on the commercial market for electric vehicles since taking power at the startup. He downplayed the subscription model in March, though Canoo does still plan to offer it in some capacity. And he pivoted Canoo away from providing engineering work to other companies, apparently killing the deal with Hyundai.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *