Canoo Ready To Open Battery Plant In Mayes County

Electric vehicle manufacturer Canoo plans to open a battery module assembly plant in the Mid-America Industrial Park by early summer.

The equipment for the assembly line sits in crates for now, but Canoo CEO Tony Aquila said the plant could open at the earliest in late May.

“We'll create 110 jobs here this year, we'll test the workforce,” he said, while outlining plans for several sub-assembly sites that will eventually feed parts to a full assembly plant at Mid-America.

While that was originally planned to open first, Aquila said the company plans changed towards building the supply chain first.

The factory will pack batteries made by Panasonic into the modules used by the EV Canoo is building.

“We have suppliers who make things we design, and those are shipped in, they're queued, and then they go into the assembly line,” he said.

Aquila said company is committed to building an all-American made car, and decided on Oklahoma two years ago mainly because of location.

“We searched many states for our site, and here you had more infrastructure, more workforce capability and you had hydropower, because we had a vision early on that you cannot use fossil fuels to build electric vehicles, it's net neutral, doesn't make sense. You can ship by water, rail, road, and you're in the middle of the US. If you're North America focused, this is where you want to be,” he said.

While the larger plant originally planned for Pryor won’t open for at least a couple of more years, Aquila said other announcements about Oklahoma sites were coming soon. He said by the end of the year, he expected Canoo would have 700 employees in Oklahoma.