The company has a drastically disruptive offer for automakers; we'll build you a skateboard electric vehicle chassis full of batteries, as well as your entire electric drivetrain, with more or less whatever characteristics you want in the motors, brakes, suspension, transmission and steering, using tier one suppliers. All you have to do is build the rest of the vehicle on top of it, however you like.

Not only that, the entire drivetrain is fully electronically controlled, and built into "REEcorner" modules that bolt on and off behind the wheels. Maintenance is a breeze, fleet owners can simply swap out faulty units for fresh ones. And the vehicles in question, which could range from tiny delivery pods through passenger cars, vans, 4WDs and all the way up to large electric trucks, can be driven equally well by humans, remote control units or autonomous systems. The platform doesn't care; it's everything-by-wire, the REEcorner units will accept electronic inputs from anywhere you like.

It's a heck of a pitch; once a chassis is crash tested and homologated it can provide the underpinnings of a range of different vehicles, with a vast reduction in development cost. And it's landing; Toyota's trucking subsidiary Hino is using the REE chassis as the basis for its new FlatFormer range, for one, and Indian automotive manufacturing giant Mahindra has signed on to a strategic collaboration based around electric commercial vehicles.