You might have already heard that Sandy Munro has his hands on a Canoo Lifestyle Vehicle after he posted a picture of him standing in front of one. If you are unaware of who Sandy is, he runs a world-renowned engineering and manufacturing consulting firm and he broadcasts many of his tear down and analysis videos on YouTube with other 334,000 subscribers.
To say his opinions are respected would be an understatement, so allowing him some time with one of their vehicles seems like a pretty big deal. When Sandy put out the tweet almost everyone's assumption was that he was getting his hands on one for a tear down video. We had our doubts about that after thinking about it for a little bit. With how secretive Canoo has been its surprising they would hand over a vehicle to Sandy to tear down for a video at this stage, even if his seal of approval would dispel rumors of being vaporware still to a large amount of potential retail buyers. This morning Canoo put out a fun tweet of some donuts being done by Sandy and thanked him for taking the time to check out the Canoo EVs.
This seems to indeed indicate that Sandy probably doesn't have a Canoo EV to tear down...at least not yet. They do say they're "looking forward to more" so there should be some more collaboration coming. Before we speculate on what kind of collaboration lets shift focus for a second because we now have a very clear idea on who Canoo is using for their initial SOP manufacturing!
Canoo has chosen to remain silent on who the official CM is for unknown reasons, but it didn't take very long to figure it out after they shared these images. This facility shown belongs to Roush Industries. It's located in Livonia, MI and can easily be identified by the odd arches on top of the building in the background. So there we have it, confirmation that most likely the CM is indeed Roush - which makes sense since they also did the beta and gammas builds for Canoo.
The logical next question is why would Sandy be visiting Canoo's manufacturing site if he's not picking up a vehicle to tear down? Probably not to just take a test drive and do donuts, he's likely there for a tour of the facility and manufacturing processes. At face value it's good content for his YouTube channel and good exposure for Canoo. Although it's worth noting under Tony Aquila's leadership Canoo has always acted on the belief that their product can sell itself and doesn't need the same type of hype building other OEMs have typically used via social media influencers. Lets consider the possibility that Canoo might be hiring Munro and Associates to help them with their manufacturing process. Tony mentioned bringing on very valuable and experienced people to help them do just that during the last ER.
So, I think we've done pretty well. There are still probably 100 more pieces I believe we can do in subassemblies and improve our efficiency and effectiveness. And we're going to be bringing in some very experienced people in the phase as we ramp that up in our manufacturing team. So--and we've got a good start of a team. We'll be focused on that team and bringing in people that are highly profitable, very experienced in multiple car launches. - Tony Aquila
Of course that is just speculation, maybe it's as simple as they reached out over twitter and set up a play date. Either way, it's exciting to see real 'titans' of industry get to test out Canoo's capabilities and we look forward to hearing Sandys review!
Authors disclosures: I am long Canoo - I own common shares, warrants and call options.