platform to be shared by the Army and Marine Corps, for the Defense Department’s Joint Light Tactical Vehicle program.
The Defense Department has also been engaging with the startup Canoo, and that’s where things really get interesting. Canoo has been coming on strong over the past couple of years, including an order for 4,500 of its vans last summer . NASA also raised the Canoo profile last spring, when it selected the company to provide launchpad transportation for astronauts in its Artemis moon mission.The somewhat odd appearance of Canoo’s lozenge-shaped vans masks a flexible, modular design that sparked the interest of the US Army, which ordered up exactly one vehicle to analyze last summer.“[T]he Light Tactical Vehicle can be converted from a pickup to a flatbed truck, a cargo vehicle and more.
The Army must have liked what they saw already, because last week the Defense Innovation Unit tasked Canoo with supplyingis modular to support different vehicle configurations and engineered to provide industry-leading energy density,” the company stated. “The system is designed to be flexible and compatible with cells from leading battery providers and engineered to evolve with changes in cell size and chemistry as the industry matures, scales and reduces costs.