Former employee with Canoo prior to Oklahoma relocation says state leaders missed signs company was bad investment

OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — A former Canoo employee, who worked for the company in Arkansas before the State of Oklahoma offered it millions in performance-based incentives to locate in Oklahoma, says if Oklahoma leaders did their research, they should have seen plenty of signs that the company would not be a good investment.

News 4 reported Wednesday when electric vehicle manufacturer "Canoo" announced it had furloughed its remaining workers in Oklahoma and would be “idling” its two plants in the state.

That announcement came after Canoo announced some of its employees had been furloughed in November.

In 2023, Governor Kevin Stitt and Oklahoma Department of Commerce leaders announced the State of Oklahoma had awarded Canoo, a start-up electric vehicle manufacturer, more than $100 million in state-funded, performance-based incentives.

The plan was to pay out the incentives to the electric vehicle manufacturer over a 10-year period to help the company get off the ground.

In exchange, Canoo would manufacture its vehicles in Oklahoma, bringing the state jobs and potentially millions in tax revenue.

They opened a battery manufacturing plant at the Mid-America Industrial Park in Pryor and a vehicle assembly plant in Oklahoma City.

The company never built anything at the battery plant.

Last year, Canoo claimed it built its first three vehicles at the Oklahoma City plant before selling them to the State of Oklahoma.

But, in an exclusive interview with News 4, a former Canoo employee said the three vehicles were actually built by a different company in Texas.

Canoo hemorrhaged money.

In 2023, the company lost more than $300 million.

It’s stock price sat below one cent per share as of Thursday evening.

It barely met any performance goals the State of Oklahoma put in place, and the state has only awarded Canoo $1 million, to date, according to the Oklahoma Department of Commerce.

But, before any of that, before Canoo came to Oklahoma at all, there was Bentonville, Arkansas.

That’s where News 4 found one former Canoo employee, with some of their thoughts.

“It was just kind of comical what they were doing,” the former employee told News 4.

The former employee, who doesn’t want her identity known, took a job with Canoo in 2022, when the company was getting ready to open a battery factory at a Bentonville warehouse.

“I was looking for a new job and something that paid better than my current position,” said the former employee.

She says, Canoo seemed to do all the right things.

“I was getting paid $25 an hour,” she said. “And the full benefits. Per diem was $50 a day… So everything seemed great.”

Canoo jetted her and the other new hires out to the company’s then-headquarters in Torrance, California, where they planned to train them for three months.

It was quite the place.

“Their break room was amazing,” she said. “We were getting paid a per diem. They housed us all in a hotel that was nearby.”

She says the training finished pretty quickly, so Canoo had her get right to work on building batteries during their remaining time in California.

“It was until the facility in Bentonville could get prepared,” the former employee said. “And then we got notice that it wasn't going to be ready right away and that they had to send us back home because they couldn't afford to keep us down in California.”

She says that would be the first of many red flags to come.

The next one came when she got back to Arkansas.

“They said they gave us two options,” she said. “We could either be let go at that time, or we could, if we wanted to, we could do what they said would be charity work at a at a farm, which sounded great.”

For the next several months, her team got their hands dirty working on that farm, and then when winter came, Canoo had them volunteer at a thrift store.

She says, Canoo’s management structure was a mess.

“We had a 19-year-old supervisor—whose father was a supervisor, like, management,” she said. “And so our supervisor got moved up because of his dad. He did not have any managing experience. It was very evident that he didn't have experience. We had other employees that were smoking pot in the car. They would just stay in the car while we're at the farm and be smoking marijuana. While we were at the thrift store, some of the other employees, they would they would be in the receiving, and they would take stuff that was brought into the thrift store and posted it for sale on Marketplace before it even got brought in or logged.”

She says Canoo paid her team their full salaries and benefits the whole time they did that volunteer work. She was never exactly sure where the money came from.

“They kept telling us that there was their plant in Detroit and that there were vehicles being sold up there, and that you could see these vehicles being driven in Detroit,” she said. “Otherwise, we had heard that they had at one point received some money from a company from Saudi Arabia, from some investors from out there. But we never really heard how it was happening. It just happened.”

While they were doing their volunteer work, Canoo’s CEO was telling News 4’s Bentonville sister station, KNWA, that Canoo’s delays there were a result of challenges they faced while negotiating a lease for a second building.

“Because of the type of equipment we were gonna put in there and what it was gonna do, they wanted north of a $40 million deposit,” Canoo CEO, Tony Aquila, told KNWA in 2023.

The former employee News 4 spoke with says the company told her a different story.

“They didn't get the EPA testing done, so they couldn't open up a battery plant that was right next door to residential houses,” the former employee said.

Regardless of why, at that point, Canoo had no place to dock in Arkansas.

“They said that they were going to look at moving to Oklahoma and opening out there because Bentonville wasn't going to happen,” the former employee said. “They sent out a message asking us if we would be willing to work in Oklahoma. And we all said, yes.”

That would be a short lived promise.

“They just called us on the phone… they go, ‘we're just calling, you know, to let you know that you've been let go, your job has been terminated,’” she said. “And so I asked them, I said, ‘well, what about Oklahoma? I was going to move to Oklahoma for it.’ And they said, ‘no, that's a possibility.’”

That ended her time at Canoo.

But it wasn’t the end of the world, because she already had concluded by that point it was pretty clear Canoo would not be long for the world anyway.  

“I just kept seeing their stocks going lower and lower,” she said. “I don't see how they could pull themselves out of it.”

So, she couldn’t help but laugh when she saw Oklahoma had offered Canoo the $100 million incentive.

“I was like, it's the same thing that they did to Bentonville,” she said.

It’s a decision she says any amount of research should have shown Oklahoma leaders—it was one they shouldn’t make.

“I think it is pretty evident after what happened in Bentonville,” she said. “I don't know why anybody would have trusted them.”

And it’s a decision, she says, had real-world effects.

“I felt really bad for the people who got furloughed because I know what it feels like,” she said. “It was exactly what happened to us. Promised great things. It seemed like a great company to work for at the time. And then you see what's really happening.”

For two days, News 4 has made repeated attempts to reach Governor Stitt’s Office to get his thoughts on what’s happening with Canoo.

Nobody has responded.

News did hear from the Oklahoma Department of Commerce.

A department spokesperson said, since the incentives were performance-based, the state has only given Canoo $1 million as of Thursday, and the department will look into clawing that money back, if necessary.