Amazon’s first custom electric delivery vehicle
According to Amazon’s company blog on October 8th, 2020, the company announced its first custom electric delivery vehicle.
Amazon has revealed its first custom electric delivery vehicle. The company designs and builds it with Rivian. As a result, it expects to have 10,000 of the new vans on the road delivering to customers as early as 2022.
In fact, Amazon has committed the Climate Pledge commitment to be net-zero carbon by 2040. The company expects to have 100,000 of the vehicles on the road by 2030. This is one of three different models that Amazon has invested in, and completely customized with Rivian. As a result,it can save millions of metric tons of carbon per year. At the same time, it can enhance the driver experience and optimizing safety.
“When We collaborate with Rivian to create our first customized electric delivery vehicle, we knew it is really needed. Thus, you can see that drivers love using it and customers feel excited.” said Ross Rachey, Director of Amazon’s Global Fleet and Products. “Amazon combined Rivian’s technology with our delivery logistics knowledge. Of course, we expect the result is what you see here-the future of last mile delivery.”
“The vehicle we’ve developed with Amazon is not just electric. We prioritized safety and functionality to create a vehicle that’s optimized for package delivery,” said RJ Scaringe, Rivian CEO.
Who is Amazon?
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in Bellevue, Washington, in 1994. The company offers many service areas such as e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Nowadays, we can listen to the phrase “GAFA”, which is an acronym to represent FOUR big technology company (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple). The tech giant is one of the few companies to reach 1 trillion market capitalization. Thus, we can easily conclude that Amazon affects and changes our daily life.
Who is Rivian?
According to Wikipedia, Rivian is an American automaker and automotive technology company. Founded in 2009, the company develops vehicles, products and services related to sustainable transportation. It has facilities in Plymouth, Michigan; Normal, Illinois; San Jose, Irvine, and Carson, California; Vancouver, Canada; and the United Kingdom. In 2017, the US company announced it was building an electric sport utility vehicle (SUV) and pickup truck on a platform. Both vehicles will be semi-autonomous and are designed for both on-road and off-road driving.
Rivian is a new company in automobile industry. However, the start-up has already been the key partner for Amazon. Thus, this announcement is a good opportunity in terms of both business expansion and improvement of brand awareness.
Carbon Footprint
According to the sustainability of Amazon, Carbon Footprint is defined as follows.
Amazon’s corporate carbon footprint quantifies the total greenhouse gas emissions attributed to our direct and indirect operational activities. We measure our total impact on the climate, map the largest activities contributing to this impact, and use this information to develop meaningful carbon reduction goals, including our overall goal to reach net zero carbon across Amazon by 2040.
Sustainability and Climate Change are big issues for every company. What’s more, the tech giant like Amazon has strong responsibility for tackling those issues. Therefore, introduction of its first custom electric delivery vehicle is not surprised us. However, we still do not know how much the vehicles has actual impact on Carbon Footprint now. The only thing we can confirm is that every corporation has to take climate change into consideration. That is why Deutsche Post DHL Group tries to realize carbon neutral logistics. This is just one example, but the important example.
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