Amazon will ship, on average, just over 1.6 million packages today. And tomorrow. And every day after that. Amazon delivers so many packages per day that it basically had to invent a new package delivery vehicle to save itself time and money. Working with electric truck company Rivian, Amazon developed its own vehicle from scratch to help its drivers get through the day.
The new Amazon-branded vans are absolutely unmistakable, and that works in Amazon’s favor. While you might be able to ignore a Prime-liveried Ram Promaster, the Rivian is distinctly its own vehicle. When you see one of these, and you almost certainly have or soon will, you won’t be able to see anything but Amazon. Amazon made sure of that. Amazon has already ordered 100,000 of these from Rivian.
Something I didn’t know before this video from Marques Brownlee, is that Amazon has ordered these vans in two different sizes. I’ve seen a few of them, and thought the size difference was just a trick of the eye. They’re both based on the same front-wheel drive architecture, and both carry the same size battery for about 150 miles of range (which is more than plenty for the miles a delivery driver needs to run in a day).
The driver cockpit area is slick and designed with ease of use in mind. While most of the controls, in typical Rivian fashion, have moved into a touch screen, there is still a button for the emergency flasher. Drivers use that button quite often, and needed it to remain a physical button. The cockpit is huge, with giant forward visibility and easy-to-use mirrors.
The driver door is a traditional swing-open door, but the sidewalk side door is a slider pocket door to aid driver ingress and egress, and avoid smashing into pedestrians. My favorite door, however, is the rear roll-up door, which has been optimized to prevent driver fatigue. Instead of having to yank up a heavy rolling door, the Amazon van’s door can self-retract at the push of a button. You still have to pull the door down yourself, but then you have gravity on your side.
Amazon loading and shipping facilities have big charging docks for these machines to overnight charge en masse. They’re going to be sucking down some serious electrons when there are forty or fifty of these things in for the night. The good thing is, most drivers will use less than 33% of the Rivian’s range, so anxiety over making it to the end of the day should never really be a problem.
This is a slick machine inside and out. It’s a shame the US Postal Service didn’t choose these (or an even smaller version of these) as its next mail van.