A company that took money from the state to produce electric vehicles is being accused of not making a single vehicle.

Canoo Electric Vehicles Shuts Down All Oklahoma Facilities

Electric vehicles are getting more and more popular in recent years and the State of Oklahoma was excited that a brand was going to call Oklahoma home. Canoo opened a battery manufacturing plant at the Mid-America Industrial Park in Pryor and a vehicle assembly in Oklahoma City. The state was going to give Canoo 100 MILLION DOLLARS over ten years for these two production facilities. The money was contract based with goal incentives based on how many jobs they brought to Oklahoma. Looks like Canoo furloughed all of their Oklahoma employees this week and one of them is speaking out.

Canoo Allegedly Did Not Make ONE Vehicle in Oklahoma EVER

“I can tell you, those did not come off our assembly line,” the former employee told KFOR in a recent interview. “If you talk to any Canoo employee, they’ll tell you those do not come off the assembly line.” This employee claims Canoo showed off three vehicles that 'came off' the Oklahoma assembly line, which were actually made in Texas, then shipped to Oklahoma to make it look like they were made in house. According to this employee, the software used to make the assembly line run, was never paid by Canoo. So they had the equipment to make it work, but were not paying for the technology to make it run.

Allegedly Many Employees Did Not Move to Oklahoma

This employee also claims Canoo was going to move 140 of their employees from California to Oklahoma as a part of this plan. He claims that many of these people had an Oklahoma address, but did not come into the facility that often. “Most of these people, all they did was get Oklahoma addresses and turn them in and say they moved, but they never did,” the former employee told KFOR. “A lot of the engineers, some of the directors, things like that, they would just travel here every couple of weeks, spend a week here, go home for a week, and come back.

Oklahoma State Department of Commerce on Canoo

Mentioned earlier that the State of Oklahoma was planning to give this company 100 MILLION DOLLARS based on incentives. According to the State Department of Commerce, Canoo has only received one million dollars. They released the following statement to KFOR, "After finding out about Canoo’s decision to furlough employees and idle its Oklahoma City factory, we are taking steps to protect taxpayers, and if necessary, will explore avenues to claw back public dollars."

The former employee goes onto say Canoo was treating the State of Oklahoma like an ATM. We will wait and see what the future holds for Canoo at their other production facilities. The currently have three in total across California, Michigan, and Texas.