100,000 Amazon electric delivery vans will start to hit the roads from 2021. They are coming from Rivian, an electric vehicle startup that took a $700 million investment from the Amazon.
This is the largest order ever of electric delivery vehicles. With the first vans starting to deliver packages to customers in 2021, Amazon plans to have 10,000 of the new electric vehicles on the road as early as 2022 and all 100,000 vehicles on the road by 2030 – saving 4 million metric tons of carbon per year by 2030.
The announcement came alongside news of the The Climate Pledge Amazon co-founded with Global Optimism. The Climate Pledge calls on signatories to be net zero carbon across their businesses by 2040 — a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement’s goal of 2050. Amazon is also pledging to be net zero carbon by 2040, and use 100% renewable energy by 2030
Rivian also plans to make consumer vehicles, with a pick up truck and SUV slated to launch in 2020. Amazon appear to have jumped the gun with the news of a delivery vehicle which hadn’t yet been announced and with the time lines for deployment that they have set it’s going to boost Rivian’s production schedules enormously. It hasn’t been made clear if this is a private contract with the electric delivery vans being exclusively built for Amazon or if they will also be available for other carriers to purchase.
To put an order for 100,000 vehicles into perspective, Tesla only produced 51,095 cars in their first year of production in 2015. Whilst all 100,000 Amazon electric delivery vans won’t be manufactured in the 1st year, this is a serious boost to Rivian’s plans and will doubtless provide much needed finance to grow their business for the future.