Canoo Halts Operations With ‘Mandatory Unpaid Break’

Canoo seems to be up a creek without a paddle. On December 18, the company sent its employees home on a “mandatory unpaid break,” which is set to last through the end of 2024. As of now, the outlook for the EV startup in 2025 remains uncertain. o put it simply, nothing appears rosy for the once-promising electric vehicle manufacturer.

All of this caps off an incredibly challenging year for Canoo. In April, reports revealed that the company spent twice as much on the CEO’s private jet as it earned in all of 2023. By August, it was facing lawsuits for missing payments to a debtor. Then, in November, the company furloughed 23 percent of its staff.

Read: Canoo Furloughs 23% Of Factory Staff After Selling Only 22 Vehicles Last Year

TechCrunch reports that the brand locked employees out of their access to Canoo systems beginning on December 20. Benefits are said to last throughout the rest of the month. On top of this, a new report from KFOR says that Canoo lied about building cars in Oklahoma.

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In November 2023, the brand announced it was delivering its first “made in Oklahoma” EVs to the state government. The governor even celebrated the occasion, stating, “For the first time in 17 years, vehicle manufacturing is back in Oklahoma.” However, it turns out that might not be entirely true.

In an interview with KFOR, a former employee of Canoo claims that not a single car was made in the factory there. They also shed some light on the financial trouble the brand is facing. “They hired too many, too quick, and paid too much,” the former employee said. “Everybody was a boss, and everybody wanted to be everybody’s boss… everybody had a director title, so nobody’s doing anything. They have tons of equipment… It looks great. They have literally everything to run an entire assembly line for cars.”

Despite that equipment, they made no bones about where the production cars came from. “I can tell you, those did not come off our assembly line… If you talk to any Canoo employee, they’ll tell you those do not come off the assembly line.”

Read: Canoo Made $886,000 In 2023, Spent $1.7 Million On CEO’s Private Jet

“All those were handmade in Justin, Texas, by a totally separate company called AFV,” the unnamed employee said. “They made them, they handmade them, and then they just brought them here. And most of them, they ended up just getting – like 90 percent of all the vehicles just got decals swapped out on them.”

Notably, the CEO of Canoo, Tony Aquila also owns AFV. Carscoops reached out to the company to get its take on the situation and has not receive a reply as of this writing.