Watch how this $500 van destroyed a $9 billion company

They only may be made 30 or 40 of these vans. So if you do man maths on it, you know it could be a 500 million pound van. Have you heard of a company called a Rival, which none of you probably have In the UK they were a big deal. They were valued at 9:00 billion dollars on the Stock Exchange when they went public and they no longer exist now. Should we say So that was a big old loss for a lot of people. The plan was they were basically going to build an electric van for people like UPS Amazon, which you see these days that the electric Amazon vans, like they're made by Rivian. They were basically going to do this and they were going to be the first to do this. They were going to have these mobile small factories all over the world building these vans. And the vans were composite, aluminium composite. They were very well designed or start to be very well designed, but then fortunately the company went bust. There's a fair few floors there which I will spill the beans on because I have no ties to them and they don't exist anymore. And I'm sure it'll annoy a load of the old Arrival engineers and they'll hate me even though I need them to help me fix what I bought. We'll get to that later. So they developed this van, and I'm not going to go into too much technical detail, but it was quite overcomplicated. Most cars have a battery pack with a single set of contactors and that's it. And it's say 100 kilowatt hours. But within their pack they had 18 battery packs, each 3 kilowatt hours, and every one of them had its own set of contactors. So from a complication level there was a lot to go wrong. It just in that alone they developed an amazing motor technology and they had 2 speed gearboxes and they could do all these crazy inclines and all this stuff but it's everything was massively over engineered, hugely technical, sort of hard to probably long term service and maintain. But nonetheless they built a nice vehicle. It looked really cool. It was quite retro and they did the UPS branded ones probably 6 months ish ago they went into administration, controlled administration. I visited them a couple of times over the years because I knew people that worked there and they had about 6 or 7 sites scattered around the UK and every one of them was vast, I mean 100,000 square feet places or bigger massive places. One of them had a multi million pound CNC that was bigger than this room. Yeah, just money was no object. It was just thrown it and thrown it and thrown it. But what had happened is they defaulted on payments. So landlords had taken back facilities. Because they defaulted on payments, they were able to sell off everything that was inside them, which meant there was a lot of stuff in those which potentially didn't want to get out into public domain. But because they've been seized by the landlords to be resold, there's nothing they could do about it. And on these listings there was loads of robotic arms, like stone rappers, like there's all sorts of cool stuff. But the key thing was, as I saw on that, there was a UPS branded electric van. Now if anyone knows UPS, if they do sell their vans, they're always DE branded and they're always colour changed normally or they're crushed. UPS don't let vans out. I was quite lucky in that this came up on the Orchard and I bid it on it. I somehow won it and they let me leave the premises with it all branded and done. But when we wrote the premises, because it was the auction house, we got the opportunity that we actually went around and filmed a whole YouTube episode in the premises of the vans that were there. The technology was there, the robotic arms, just the vastness of components that were all just going to go to waste. Basically, whenever you go to an auction place, always go to the auctioneer when you get there and go what didn't sell, Because what you'll always find is when you get in there and you ask what didn't sell, they have a week or 2 to clear that premises. They're not going to do another auction so whatever didn't sell they will put an extremely low value on to get it gone. Otherwise they got paid to dispose of it. So I basically got there was like what didn't sell and I was looking for the list and I said there's more vans on here. Like they're not UPS branded vans but they're still vans. And they were outside from the parking lot and I asked him how much. So I managed to buy another 2 vans for 500 pounds each. You think the value of that company, they only maybe made 30 or 40 of these vans. So if you do man maths on it, you know it could be a 500 million pound van. Realistically it's probably still 1,000,000 pound van though, because the amount of Rd and development that went into them and they were just so cheap. Now the issue I've found since is trying to get them to drive is a whole of the world of plane. And I'm following that process for at the moment on my my Hazelnut 's YouTube channel, step by staff of trying to get these vans to work and trying to get help to get them operational. Yes, we did a whole video there. I've now got the van at the location in Bristol, started stripping the UPS van apart and just finding all these things and I'm like, why is that there? Why is this here? Things like I took the rad pack off the front and there's a 12 Volt battery behind the radiator in the front. You can't even get to it as you take the whole front of the van. So there's all these weird things I just don't quite can't grasp and get my head around. Yeah, I'm trying to fix this van and get it back together. Now I saw one of them off the second van is now going to basically become a race fan. So what was I, the Ford did this race fan that they took up Goodwood and everyone was sort of like it's the fastest fan, but it's not really a van that you can't put anything in it. So the plan is now is to take one and strip it, put dual motor in it, big battery pack and actually make a practical race fan that's ridiculously quick, but that we can actually potentially do deliveries with just for a big a good video. And so try to get that one running, that one on the road and then fix the UPS fan up and maybe get it registered. I don't think UPS will be particularly happy with me. They did message me as soon as I got it. And we're basically like, look, we're not giving you a cease and assist, but please never drive this on the road or let you release your YouTube videos because obviously it looks it's still pushing the UPS brand. But the UPS also quite hurt because they invested a lot of money into a rival that then went bust. So it's a bit of a sore spot. I think unfortunately for UPS. When you look at the van, you see the design, the fact it's got a sliding door on one side, the shutter door on the back. It's very modern UPS styling. So it actually looks really cool. And all the panels were like a carbon composite. So if you ever hit anything, you could just rip a panel off and clip a new one on. So it's designed for van drivers that just crash into stuff all the time. What we realised once we got the vans and I suddenly went I can buy a load of them, this is great. It was then this vehicle weighs 2.8 ton so therefore a normal vehicle transporter can't take it. So I had to then get a 17 and a half ton truck to move them. Problem was the cost to move that truck to my place was 400 pounds and the van did only cost 500 so it's cost me nearly as much to move it than they have to buy them which was a little bit depressing. The vans all have been numbers on them, but they have prototype VIN numbers, which in theory because they do have a VIN number, there may have been a way to apply. So they went for type approval after a certain date where every van with a VIN number after a certain date was type approved. So you can potentially apply for them. Right now I've not found a way, especially for the UPS one to apply for that. So go on. So I can take it, have an IVA test done where they test inspect the whole vehicle to put it on the road and then it'll get a queue plate, which is doable. But because the electronic system 's so in depth, like everything 's on the screen, all the headlight indicators are embedded on that screen. It's going to get to a point where if you want to get it on the road, I'm going to have to put some switches and buttons in to do those things because they're a bit finickity on the screen and don't quite work properly. Unless there's someone out there that knows the software and wants to help fix it, which there definitely is. There's blatantly someone out there has got a couple of laptops from Arrival that used to work there that knows exactly how to fix these things but has been so much tied up in Ndas until they went bust that now, But now they've officially gone literally the last couple of weeks. Maybe someone will come along and be like, I can help you, we'll get out on the road, fix it and then we can do some burnouts in the electric van, which would be quite funny. That's where I've sort of got to. I've got these really cool vans trying to get working now from this ridiculously expensive company and whether I will ever get them on the road again or not is completely unknown, so it might been a massive waste of money for me. This month of VIN Wiki content is brought to you by Auto Tempest. Auto Tempest supported VIN Wiki for years, Car Trek as well all of our friends, but what we really love them for is that it is the most powerful way to shop for your next car. They compile all the results from all the major listing sites into one place. Autotempest.com all the cars one search. That means you get to all the deep, dark corners of the Internet to find the exact car that you're looking for as fast and efficiently and powerfully as possible. You also get to see how it stacks up against all the other cars like it that are for sale around the country. 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