Electric vehicle maker Canoo Inc., which is moving its headquarters to Bentonville, announced Monday that it had secured a commercial site in Oklahoma City for vehicle manufacturing.
The site on 120 acres was leased by AFV Partners LLC, a private equity firm founded by Canoo CEO Tony Aquila, the company said in a news release. It will provide nearly 500,000 SF of space, with room to expand.
The facility will support a full general and final vehicle assembly line, state-of-the-art robotics, a body shop, paint shop and automated paint line including e-coat and sealing, quality control, complete vehicle testing, validation and more, the company said in a news release. It includes an existing training center and test track.
Canoo expects to employ more than 500 people at the facility, which will be part of a hub that includes a "mega microfactory" being built on 400 acres in Pryor, Oklahoma, and a 100,000-SF battery module production facility.
Aquila told investors in a quarterly earnings call last month that he expects the company’s Oklahoma manufacturing facilities to produce 20,000 vehicles by the end of 2023. He said about 65% of the equipment needed for assembly lines is now on the ground, and with what is in transit, 85% will soon be in Oklahoma.
As Canoo gets closer to production in Oklahoma, the company's plan to build electric vehicles in for Bentonville is on hold. Aquila told KNWA last month that lease negotiations for a facility in Bentonville had stalled but that the city remains "part of our long-term strategy."
The publicly traded company (Nasdaq: GOEV) reported losses of $80.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2022, less than the $138.1 million loss it posted in the same quarter the previous year.
For the full year, Canoo's losses widened from $356.8 million to $487.7 million.
