Things aren’t looking good for the EV startup Canoo. The company had big plans to produce electric trucks and vans that were quite different from the designs we’re used to. Originally called Evelozcity, and renamed Canoo in 2019, the company was founded by former Faraday Future executives Stefan Krause and Ulrich Kranz in 2017.
In November of 2024, Krause and Kranz left the company, and Canoo furloughed 30 employees at its plant in Oklahoma City. On December 18, Canoo reportedly put the rest of its staff on a “mandatory unpaid break” for the remainder of 2024, locking them out of company systems, and now some of those employees are speaking out about the company’s missteps.
A Whole Lot Of Nothing In Oklahoma
In an interview with Oklahoma TV station KFOR, a “former high-level Canoo employee” expressed no surprise about the recent developments, citing mismanagement and little activity at the Oklahoma City plant. “They hired too many, too quick, and paid too much,” the former employee said. “Everybody was a boss, and everybody wanted to be everybody’s boss … everybody had a director title, so nobody’s doing anything.”
As for its employees, “The majority of those folks that were employed there, especially those hourly people, were just standing around twiddling their thumbs.” He said no vehicles were ever built at the Oklahoma City facility, and the few that were trotted out were hand-built in Texas by AFV, another company owned by Canoo CEO Tony Aquila. “And most of them, they ended up just getting — like 90 percent of all the vehicles just got decals swapped out on them,” the employee said.
Smoke And Mirrors
A second former employee told KFOR that leadership lacked motivation, and that much of the equipment wasn’t functioning. “There was not one robotics line that actually worked to fabricate a part,” this employee said. But during tours, robots would be put into what they called “ghost mode” in order to look productive.
“There was a couple key robots that were able to do like, kind of not full movements, but kind of mimic, you know, kind of a movement that it would do if it was operating.”
Canoo May Have To Pay
According to The Frontier, Canoo acknowledged that it had furloughed 82 employees and closed two factories in Oklahoma, but that “We are hopeful that we will be able to bring them back to work soon.” According to that report, though, Canoo was approved to receive $100 million in State incentives, of which it has already received $1 million, under the promise of creating jobs. It may have to pay that back, as Canoo is required as part of the deal to keep at least 80 percent of those 100 jobs for at least 18 months.
“After finding out about Canoo’s decision to furlough employees and idle its Oklahoma City Factory, we are taking steps to protect taxpayers, and if necessary, will explore avenues to clawback public dollars,” Evan Brown, executive director of the Office of Economic Development, Growth, and Expansion, told The Frontier.
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