Noooo, Canoooo is toast!

This was the electric car of my dreams, and now it is gone.

Canoo, the little electric minibus that looks like a toaster, is bankrupt. I have been writing about it for years; I wanted one. It was a brave little toaster of a car, shorter than our Subaru Impreza, yet could hold more than most pickup trucks. I won’t go into the details of how it went bankrupt because Steve Hanley did a fabulous job of it, concluding,

“The bottom line is that planning to build electric cars is easy. Actually becoming an EV manufacturer is hard. Apple spent billions and never got as far as Canoo did…Lots of people will be feeling a sense of loss for what could have been but now never will be.”

I want to talk about the design, because it deserves to be celebrated. Back in 2020, Richard Kim, in charge of design at Canoo, described it as a loft on wheels.

"Cars always have been designed to convey a certain image and emotion; however, we chose to completely rethink car design and focus on what future users will actually need. Thus, we came up with this loft-inspired vehicle.”

The Canoo put all the guts of the car, the batteries and the motors, in a "Skateboard", a term used by Amory Lovins a dozen years ago, where all the workings of the car are squished into the bottom and the body is stuck on top. But Canoo takes it even further with its "steer by wire", with no hardware connection between the steering wheel and the wheels, noting:

“Steer-by-wire offers weight savings and paves the way for autonomous driving. We have complete freedom to locate the steering wheel to suit any cabin design and driver position. It also leads to a more responsive and smoother driving experience. Since steer-by-wire eliminates the need for a mechanical connection, there is more freedom to arrange the interior space of the vehicle to provide customers with exciting new vehicle options.”

I loved the visibility, the low window in the front that will let you see the kid walking in front, in case the seven cameras, five radars, and 12 ultrasonic sensors don't.

Volkswagen did this in the ‘50s, taking the VW Beetle platform and sticking a box on top with their air-cooled engine at the rear.

They even had a pickup truck version, easy to do since you just change the top design. I wrote about it:

Just like the Canoo van reminded me of a Volkswagen bus, the Canoo pickup is very much like the Volkswagen pickup truck of the late 50s and early 60s, with its fold-down sides and enclosed storage under the bed. They even have about the same payload; the Canoo has a capacity of 1800 pounds, the VW could carry 1764 pounds. It is also a versatile design:

"Canoo designed its pickup truck to be the most cab-forward and space efficient on the market, with massive cargo capacity on the smallest footprint possible... Lined with trim and materials selected for durability, the extended cab vehicle has two seats in the front with a customizable rear compartment that can accommodate two additional seats or support additional purpose-built use-case configurability."

What I loved the most was they way it was designed from first principles, from the ground up, writing:

As Bucky Fuller found back in 1934, when you design a vehicle from the ground up instead of from preconceptions and expectations, you get a different result. You get great visibility because the driver is pushed forward to where they can see kids in front of the car. You get more room behind; with the Canoo, it delivers a six-foot truck bed in a vehicle that is only 184 inches long, only 6 inches longer than a Subaru Impreza, and a full 5 feet shorter than an F-150. And because carrying a 4x8 sheet of plywood was the classic requirement of a pickup, it has a pop-out extension to enlarge the truck bed.

Unfortunately, when you design a vehicle from the ground up, it often scares people away. That’s why we get skeuomorphism, and why our electric pickup trucks look just like our gas powered pickup trucks.

Many people thought the Canoo was ugly. I thought it was a great design, based on a heritage going back to Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Car through the Volkswagen bus and Amory Lovins's skateboard. I concluded in 2020:

Perhaps that's why I like the Canoo. It's small, its form truly does follow its function rather than the preconceived notion of what a car should look like, and they are thinking and rethinking everything. which every designer of just about anything should be doing these days. Whether people will accept it is another story.

I suppose that now all incentives for building electric cars have been killed by the new American government, that there is no chance of anyone rescuing it. This is such a shame; it was such a brave little toaster of a car.