Fleet electric vehicle manufacturer Canoo Inc. made good on rumors last week and announced the relocation of its headquarters to Texas.
The seven-year-old company, which up to this point was based in Torrance, also announced the relocation of its engineering workforce to Oklahoma. In addition to migrating its existing workforce, the company also expects to continue bolstering its staff headcount.
It’s a move the company has more or less intimated for about three years. Canoo built its vehicle manufacturing plant in Pryor, Oklahoma, in 2021. The company’s executive leadership team has also operated out of Justin, Texas, since 2021; the corporate headquarters are now there as well.
It’s also not Canoo’s first choice for a headquarters relocation. The company took out a 10-year lease of an industrialization facility in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2022 and said it would ultimately move its home base there. Neither ever materialized and Canoo listed that building as a sublease earlier this year.
The headquarters move announcement was preceded by a report in The Verge that Canoo cofounder and Chief Technology Officer Sohel Merchant had left the company at about the same time Canoo in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing indicated it was reorganizing its Torrance operation.
It remains unclear whether the headquarters relocation spells the end of the company’s operations in California.
“Canoo is still evaluating the company’s presence in the state of California,” a Canoo spokeswoman said in an email.
Canoo designs and manufactures battery-electric commercial vans, primarily for a fleet-oriented customer case. The company has also debuted a pickup truck design.
Domestic customers for Canoo include the U.S. Postal Service, which in January purchased six vans for postal carrier use; Kingbee Vans, a Utah-based van rental company that took delivery 9,300 deliveries of Canoo vans this year; Hawthorne-based Prime Time Shuttle, which ordered up to 550 vans for luxury and airport transportation use; and NASA, which took delivery of several vans to transport fully suited astronauts to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for Artemis program missions. This spring, Canoo went international after inking a deal with a Saudi Arabian paint manufacturer.
Founded in 2017, Canoo went public in late 2020 following a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, merger.
Last week’s announcement sent Canoo’s share prices on a decline. After opening the week at $1.45 a share, it closed that Monday at $1.31 and by Thursday had fallen to $1.24.
