Daydreaming as a kid, one might wistfully wander off into some imaginary world picturing futuristic people and places, and how the former moves in the latter in this assumedly utopian scene. While the outfits might be magnificently ‘bad catwalk’ chic, and with the urban venues and spaces now gritty and characterful or pristine yet drearily sleek, it will be the modes of transport that capture the full scope of your own fleeting imagination.
Hmmm. If only one could draw…
While generations have produced seemingly bazillions of deftly talented artists and creatives who can put pen or paint to paper to capture their own fantastic visions, some – names need not mentioned – are kind of left to bask in all the underrated glory that bent stick-figure drawings with ill-matching lengths and squiggles can bring.
In that context, when you see some building or vehicle supreme in its design at the time, the overwhelming feeling in that moment of abject removal of bias and judgement is ‘wow’. And that’s not even an internationally recognised emotion, if you want to go and check. Yet such is the impact of Arrival’s stunning ‘back in black’ e-bus design that’s close to completing pre-public use trials.
Add in the disturbingly ingenious production methodology behind it – based around what Arrival Limited calls ‘microfactories’, underwritten by cool autonomous ‘skateboards’ transporting parts around a factory floor – and that sense of wow is more than enough for the hamsters on treadmills above in your head to stop and scratch their heads as the cogs of thought enmeshed in the brain come to a grinding halt.
More wow… A bigger wow… A different type of wow altogether now fills the head.
What the Arrival concept represents – a technology company creating the world’s first Generation 2.0 electric vehicles – isn’t so much an EV range into a rapidly expanding marketplace (the Arrival Bus, commercial Van and ‘ride-sharing’ targeted car), but an entirely new way of manufacturing thought.
New materials, cleaner processes and what would inarguably be landmark less set-up and production costs and space requirements means a revolution impacting sundry products and industries globally isn’t just coming soon
