NASA and USPS discontinue use of Canoo EVs

Both organisations have stopped using EVs purchased from the now-defunct start-up Canoo. This is despite Canoo's former CEO Tony Aquila claiming to offer continued support for the vehicles following his company's bankruptcy.

Canoo first delivered six of its Lifestyle Delivery Vehicles (LD 190) to the United States Postal Service (USPS) back in 2024, and meanwhile signed a contract with NASA in 2022 to deliver EVs that could shuttle astronauts to the launchpad for Artemis missions to the Moon and Mars.

Amid Canoo’s bankruptcy earlier this year, Canoo CEO Tony Aquila successfully purchased the company’s assets for $4 million – telling a trustee that a ‘principal motivation’ for doing so was his ‘desire to honour [Canoo’s commitment to provide service and support for certain government programs’.

However, it’s unclear whether this ‘service and support’ was ever forthcoming. TechCrunch reports that both NASA and USPS ‘declined to share whether Aquila ever approached either agency about supporting the vehicles’, and that Aquila did not respond to any requests for comment.

Now, both NASA and USPS have confirmed that they will no longer be using Canoo EVs for their operations. NASA reportedly told TechCrunch that the vehicles are ‘no longer able to meet our mission requirements’, and that it is now leasing the Boeing ‘Astrovan’ it commissioned from Airstream for its crewed space missions. USPS on the other hand said that the six Canoo EVs it purchased in 2024 are ‘no longer in use’, stating that they were ‘for evaluation purposes’ and that ‘no further investments are anticipated’.

Canoo was once founded as Evelozcity and in its early years was led by, among others, German automotive executives Ulrich Kranz, Stefan Krause and Karl-Thomas Neumann. Both later left the company. The plan was to develop four electric vehicles optimised for urban use, based on a specially developed skateboard platform, and to offer them exclusively by subscription. Financial expert Tony Aquila came on board in 2020 in the course of the SPAC IPO and took over the CEO position in 2021 – Aquila was also one of Canoo’s largest investors.

Under Aquila’s leadership, the former subscription focus was discarded and partnerships to build EVs from other manufacturers on the Canoo platform were also terminated – since this happened shortly after the IPO and was not announced in the IPO prospectus, Canoo was later forced to pay a million-dollar fine. However, the company was never really able to meet the targeted delivery date for the vehicles, which then led to insolvency and later bankruptcy at the beginning of the year.

techcrunch.com