NASA and the United States Postal Service have stopped using electric vans made by now-bankrupt EV startup Canoo, despite the former CEO’s claim that he would provide support for the vehicles.
NASA purchased three of Canoo’s EVs in 2023 with the intention of using the vans to shuttle astronauts to the launchpad for its Artemis missions to the Moon. The space agency told TechCrunch that Canoo “was no longer able to meet our mission requirements.” As of October, NASA said it is leasing the Airstream-built “Astrovan” from Boeing that the aerospace company commissioned for its own crewed space missions.
Meanwhile, the USPS said in an emailed statement the six vehicles it purchased “for evaluation purposes” in 2024 “are no longer in use.” The “evaluation has been completed,” the postal service wrote, and “no further investments are anticipated.” The USPS declined to share any details or final results of the evaluation.
Canoo also provided at least one demonstration vehicle to the Department of Defense (DOD) before its bankruptcy. The DOD did not respond to emailed requests about whether it has continued using the van.
Canoo filed for bankruptcy in January 2025 after years of financial struggles and failing to establish a market for its electric vans. Soon after, former CEO Tony Aquila made a $4 million bid for the startup’s assets in March. Aquila told the bankruptcy trustee that a “principal motivation” for buying the assets was his “desire to honor [Canoo’s] commitment to provide service and support for certain government programs.”
NASA and the USPS declined to share whether Aquila ever approached either agency about supporting the vehicles. Aquila did not respond to a request for comment. A lawyer who represented Aquila in the bankruptcy proceedings also did not respond.
The bankruptcy judge approved the sale to Aquila in April. He was not the only entity interested in buying the company’s assets, though.
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As many as eight parties signed NDAs to evaluate Canoo’s intellectual property, prototypes, and equipment, the bankruptcy trustee said at the time. A lawyer for Canoo said a handful of those parties came close to making a bid. One was Harbinger, a California-based electric trucking company that was created by former Canoo employees in 2021. Another was a mysterious financier from the U.K. named Charles Garson.
Harbinger, at the time, had accused Canoo of hiding assets from the sale process. It also claimed the bankruptcy trustee had “unfairly favored Mr. Aquila” by accepting his offer without widely marketing the bankrupt company’s assets. Garson claimed to be willing to pay as much as $20 million for Canoo’s assets, but the judge ultimately decided the investor did not formalize his bid in time.
The trustee and lawyers for Canoo argued that Aquila presented the best and most firm bid. They also claimed one of the other potential bidders — though they never specified who — could have raised concerns with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States because of its “foreign ownership.” Lawyers for Aquila and Canoo flagged this as a particular problem in light of the contracts with NASA, the USPS, and the DOD. Harbinger and Garson declined to comment.
