Amazon India announced last week that it will have a fleet of 10,000 electric vehicles by 2025 as part of the company’s commitment to the Climate Pledge. This commitment comes after successful pilots across different cities in 2019; learnings from which have helped the company create scalable and long term EV variants to build this large fleet.
Amazon India are making implementations to aid sustainability, the introduction of the EVs will work to reduce the environmental impact of delivery.
We will continue to invest in the electrification of our delivery fleet, thereby reducing our dependence on non-renewable resources.
– Akhil Saxena, Vice President, Customer Fulfillment – APAC & Emerging Markets, Amazon
Last year it was announced that by June 2020, single-use plastic would be eliminated from India’s fulfilment centres and Amazon India also invested in energy conservation and solar power generation in its Fulfilment Centers and Sort centers, with advanced building energy management systems, and water conservation methods to make operations more sustainable.
Is the sustaibable future affordable?
In September 2019, Amazon became the first signatory of the Climate Pledge, stating that they will be net zero carbon by 2040. This is 10 years ahead of Paris Accord’s goal of 2050. The goal to have fleets of EV’S rolled out in multiple parts of the world sounds rather promising for the environment but there is a lot more to it than just that. More needs to be done by vehicle manufacturers, energy providers and national and local Governments to make the possibility feasible when the cost and lifespan of an EV battery is dissapointing. We’ve already worked out from DPD’s 2020 carbon neutral pledge that the upfront cost of EVs compared to diesel is massive and with an expected life span of five years, the electric future is still a bit foggy.
To end on a positive note you might like to see Jeff Bezos riding around in an EV…
Hey, India. We’re rolling out our new fleet of electric delivery rickshaws. Fully electric. Zero carbon. #ClimatePledge pic.twitter.com/qFXdZOsY4y
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) January 20, 2020
