50,000 EVs Later: How Amazon Is Remaking Delivery

Speaker A: Welcome to Super Cool, a show about climate, innovation, business, and how the future is being built. I'm your host, Josh Dorfman. If you had a chance to design a delivery van from scratch, what would you think about? Would you think about the most effective way to instantly cool a driver who is getting in and out of that van repeatedly? Would you think about the cabin as just a place where a driver sits? Or would you think about it as an office? In 2019, Amazon announced that it was building an electric vehicle fleet with the goal of 100,000 vehicles on the road by 2030. Today, Amazon is already halfway there with 50,000 electric vehicles to get to get there, the team had the opportunity and the imperative to rethink everything from the tiniest details inside the van, like the coefficient of friction in the floor mats so they cushion the driver's feet through hundreds of stops a day, while also providing just the right amount of grip to all of the infrastructure required to operate an electric vehicle fleet at this scale. And that's not just about chargers. It's about mapping every route in America to. To understand temperature, topography, elevation, time of day, and all the variables that could impact the battery's capabilities so that no matter what, the package gets delivered on time. When your ambition is at planetary scale, you have to execute at a level beyond what most organizations are capable of. And that's always fascinated me about Amazon. Tom Champananakal, Director of Fleet for the Americas at Amazon, told me that in every Amazon meeting, there's an empty chair. It represents the customer. M It's one thing for an organization to say it's customer focused. It's another thing to be truly obsessed by it. And when the targets for the business are really beyond anything that's ever been done before, that customer obsession cuts through what could otherwise create distraction and drag. Emily Barber, director of Global Fleet and Products on Amazon, told me that when you're aiming for this kind of scale, you have to get to the right specs and the right approach very quickly.

Speaker B: So.

Speaker A: So you can standardize it. Sounds simple, but it's the principles applied ruthlessly that explain how Amazon has gotten 50,000 electric vehicles on the road in just seven years. Delivery vans from Rivian. The rest touch every class of vehicle, from electric heavy duty semi trucks moving shipping containers out of ports to e bikes in New York City that now deliver more groceries from Whole Foods than any other mode of Amazon transportation. And then there are the three wheelers and a whole fleet of electric scooters in India, because in India, that's The mode of transportation that fits the country best and makes deliveries fastest. In 2019, Amazon Co founded the Climate Pledge with Global Optimism. Electrification is a major part of how the company plans to get to net zero by 2040, 10 years ahead of the target set in the Paris agreement. Hundreds of other large global companies have signed on to the pledge too. Here's my conversation with Emily and Tom. Emily, Tom, welcome to Super Cool.

Speaker C: Thank you. Excited to be here.

Speaker A: I was saying just before we came online, hitting 50,000 EVs, just quite a testament to Amazon and of course to your leadership and others within the company as well. So I think it's going to be great to jump in and have that conversation today. I find it so interesting the way people navigate their careers at Amazon and come into the organization in one place and end up growing and growing and getting to another. Tom, um, your career has taken you from retail and private bands into one of the most complex fleets like we're talking about really in the world. Tell us a little bit about that background, your path and maybe what those roles taught you and what led you into the work you're doing today.

Speaker C: I've been super fortunate coming into Amazon. Both the company's given me a ton of interesting opportunities to, as you said, meander my way to this space itself, but also the teams I worked with and uh, the teams that I've been able to lead along the way that have done incredible work to get to this point. But I think that one consistent strain that has shown up throughout my experiences at Amazon has been sort of seeing how by being completely obsessed about our customers, you can do so much good way beyond the customer themselves, whether that's for the environment or, uh, for suppliers or for any part of the ecosystem that it takes to actually run a business. And so a couple of examples, when I started running in the food private label business, we were developing a number of coffee products. And as we were developing the coffee private branded products, we were able to work with sustainability certification organizations like the Rainforest alliance and Fair Trade International. And then through that work we were able to make meaningful impact on the environment as well as on the coffee growing community themselves, which is a fun way to be able to solve a business problem while doing good across the board as well. Another example was during COVID and you had all these hand sanitizer needs that picked up across the board. Being able to work with commercial chemical producers and transition their production over to hand sanitizers. They were able to keep the employees back on the payroll, keep their business going While we could meet our customer needs themselves. So it was always like, what does a customer need? And how do we work backwards from that has been the consistent learning journey. And that's exactly what I see playing out now with our electric fleet. Like, the customer focus is all about how do we get packages delivered reliably, consistently and efficiently to customers. But that's what drove us to building these vehicles and this ecosystem that we built today. And the good that flows from that is lower emissions for the neighborhoods, a radically better experience for our drivers, and overall just better for business. That's been the consistent journey I've been on and tons of learnings as I've gone through, and lots of thanks to the variety of teams that I've had the opportunity to work with over that time.

Speaker A: What triggers for me, as I'm hearing you talk, Tom and Emily, I want to get to your background in just a second. Is when you mentioned that singular focus on the customer and doing what's right for the customer, um, internally, does that cut through potentially a lot of different ways to approach challenges? And does someone say, like, hey, what's the best thing for the customer? Like, we need to focus on that. Does that help drive the focus for teams to go execute constantly?

Speaker C: There's a story that I think from the past at Amazon that we always talk about. We always have an empty chair in the room that represents the customer sitting at the table. And that sort of brings to light for teams to think about, okay, what is the right for that customer? What are you actually trying to solve for the customer? And get to that first principle's thinking to go. Once you get laser focused on it, a lot of other things sort of get out of the equation and simplify the problem for us to go solve.

Speaker A: Do you want to add to that, Emily?

Speaker B: I think I might cover it in my journey. Tom has set me up. Go for it nicely. Yeah. Similar to Tom, I've been on what I would call a non linear but extremely fun journey here at Amazon. I'm coming up on 11 years in a couple of weeks and I think I've had eight roles if I've counted appropriately. So it's been never a dull moment. I started my journey in field operations as a frontline supervisor in a warehouse in Toronto, Valley of the Beast, so to speak. And I think from this chapter I really saw, saw how Amazon has scaled operations. And I think the core of that is standardization, taking the best way to do something, codifying it in technology, equipment and process. And that gives you the ingredients to walk into any building that we have around the world and find core components that are recognizable and that unlocks really standard outcomes, essentially. M my second chapter at Amazon is really resonating with what Tom was saying. Heavy, bulky product is what we define as product that's over £50. Think of furniture, mattresses, TVs, etc. And we'd had a really poor customer experience for this product. I hate to say that, but it's small volume, but it's expensive. It's 10x the average sales price of the rest of the product that we sell at Amazon. With the customer never being wrong here at Amazon, we said like, we have to do something differently here. And there's two things that we did. We organized around it. We said, we can't just distribute this problem across the massive ecosystem that is Amazon operations. We're going to establish a single threaded team to absolutely obsess over this customer problem. And then we're going to set really aggressive goals to transform the cx. Not make incremental progress, but like transform it. And one of those, my first task in that team was to internalize our operations. So we set a goal to grow our delivery network for this product by 10x in a single year. I quickly found myself going on real estate tours in California, calling every general manager in the country to ask them for a corner of space that we could launch a delivery station in. And so to Tom's point, like from that chapter, I saw the magic of obsessing over the customer experience, organizing around it, and then setting these goals that some people may say that's crazy, like there's no way we do that in a year and go from 10 delivery stations to 100 when you don't have a single site selected on your real estate portfolio. And we hit the goal six to eight months late. But like, the power of that in catalyzing an organization is something that I'll really kind of take with me for the rest of my journey. And then before I landed in Fleet, I did a year and a half stint as uh, the chief of Staff to our SVP of Worldwide Ops. And I sort of got to see that done at, uh, many different changes across the organization. So super cool. And I think my takeaway from that chapter, if I had to pick just one, which is really hard, is the key to doing that at a pace, at an organization of this scale. That is the really deep leadership involvement. I think people would be shocked at how deep our senior leaders go on these really strategic changes. And we'll get into this and how that played out in the van world in designing this custom vehicle. But no detail is too small when it comes to driving these transformative changes across our organization. It's what, in my view, really unlocks the speed of innovation here at Amazon. So it's been super cool to sort of continue to practice and apply all these learnings in my current space, which is leading global fleet. As we're building out one of the largest EV fleets in the world. We're actively establishing and refining our standard work. We're partway through our big, hairy goal, but we've got more in the hopper that we're excited about. And I've always loved going deep. So it's been really fun to sink my teeth into some new problems over the last year and a half that I've been in this role.

Speaker A: I love hearing you talk about it. It's always been fascinating to me. I mean, I spent a couple years working for a company called Quidsy that Amazon had acquired over a decade ago and worked on a business then called vine.com, like tomato on the vine. It was like an early. It was like a Whole Foods. And then Amazon was like, ah, let's just buy Whole Foods. It was a little bit arm's length because it was an acquisition. And we were in Jersey City, we were in New York. But I was always fascinated and continue to be fascinated by just the speed and scale and scope of what Amazon does and trying to understand, like both of you were talking about, how do you do that? And last year when we had a couple other folks from Amazon on the show to talk about emissions, uh, and the logistics network and some of these really big things happening around renewables, it was like, how do you go execute this global renewable strategy? And Chris, who was on the show was like, well, you know, it's a spreadsheet with tasks. It's hard to sometimes really understand or maybe even really articulate what makes Amazon so Amazony in these big things like we're going to talk about. But it's just really cool to hear your perspectives. So let's talk about EVs. Let's talk about Emily the push. Amazon set this goal not that long ago, relatively speaking. Say we're going to have 100,000 EVs on the road. I believe that was part of the Amazon Climate Pledge. You can correct me if that's wrong or add color if that's right. And now, in true Amazon fashion, like, you're executing on it. So you've hit this milestone 50,000, just like you were talking about. But talk to us about that. I mean, at what point does this go from this is a sustainability thing to like, no, no, this is pure core strategy and this is delivering benefits. What has to change to make this type of thing possible?

Speaker B: I think for us, the sustainability benefits and it being a core strategy has really gone hand in hand from the very beginning, or that's how we thought about it. You're right about the announcement for 100,000 EDVs happening at the same time as the Climate Pledge was announced in 2019. But what some people may not know is that we'd been pursuing electrification for our transportation network well before that actually. And we'd been on the hunt for a solution that fit our needs and was also economically viable because we knew that if we could get to that place, we would be able to scale this thing extremely quickly. We talked to almost every OEM on the planet for many years in a row and sort of shared our ambition with them. And, and what we consistently heard back was one of two things not possible, or it's going to take five to six years to do. And so this is like what we were being met with in industry at the time. But we eventually, obviously the history is out there. We found Rivian and in Rivian we found a partner that really shared our ambition around decarbonizing transportation. They're an extremely mission driven organization and they were as crazy as us in terms of being willing to invent a completely new vehicle that had never been done before. And I think them being more of a startup at that time gave them such a superpower in being able to move really quickly. Ultimately, as you noted, they went from this commitment with us to delivering vehicles in three years. We put our first EDV on the road by 2022, comparing to that five to six year timeline that we were hearing from traditional players in the industry. Um, and I think when we realized that Rivian was the partner for us in this whole kind of transformation and that it was going to be a net new vehicle, they didn't have a vehicle for us to start from, that unlocked a whole different strategic element for us. We were able to completely reimagine the driver experience within this vehicle, prioritizing things like ergonomics, driver comfort, safety, if you think about even just the field of view from the windshield that we have on these vehicles. Similarly, Rivian from the very beginning has taken a software defined approach to their vehicles and that allowed us to sort of integrate our technology, our delivery technology into the vehicle in ways that weren't possible before and that unlock just an altogether better delivery experience than just having a simple transportation asset that is kind of unaware of what it's being used for. So when you put the vehicle in park, something is happening on the UI beside the driver to show them more information about the customer address they're about to deliver to. And all of these things combined together just turned this entire program into so much more than a sustainability initiative and one that we're really proud of. After that, we also saw OEMs around the world start to follow. Right. And see this data demand signal. We've partnered closely with Mercedes in Europe to name one of our other major partners around the world. As you mentioned, we got to announce all of this in 2019. We've hit our halfway milestone, but there's a, there's a lot left to do and we're confident in the path ahead.

Speaker A: Yeah, I could see that. I was actually reading an article recently, uh, Rivian, where their CEO was saying, look, there's short term, yes, a lot of car brands, companies are doubling down on gas. But like, what you're missing is, is that you're not investing the time in the software, right? So that you're going to miss out by like 2030, markets are going to come around and you're just going to miss part of the EV revolution because Rivian is going so deep on the software and centralizing into one system as opposed to having chips all over a van or a car. It's just a different type structure. And so I found that really interesting. That seems to track what you're saying. And Tom, so when you're thinking about, you know, customizing and developing that electric van. Excuse me, how do you think about that in terms of the opportunity to maybe just rethink the whole experience for the driver or what it means to actually have that type of vehicle on the road?

Speaker C: Yeah, it was an interesting point, right, because, uh, when you get to, like Emily, um, said, when you get to the realization that there really isn't something that we actually want to scale and want to run through there, you sort of break down all the barriers, like you were saying, with the customer focus in mind, and you end up with going, if you had a blank sheet of paper, what would you actually do? And what would you want this to look like? And that changed our perspective completely on it. And the few things that we were super clear on going into it was that we wanted to raise the bar on safety. We wanted to raise the bar on Driver experience and the community experience as well as we went through the building journey of it itself. At the same time, like Emily said, we wanted a vehicle that would evolve with us, that would grow with us as we went through our own journey of what customers needed, how packages needed to get to customers, and how they went through without having to wait for a new model year to come in or for a vehicle to be retired and get through that process. So that became sort of our key driving principles, if you will. How do we make this improvement over time? And I'll try to focus on the sort of driver piece and the evolution piece of it, and it's across the board. So when we think about the driver, the vehicle, we think about the vehicle as being the office for the driver. It's their office as they go through the day. And we wanted to obsess over every action that they have to take within that vehicle as they go through the day. Everything from when they're driving the vehicle, how they're experiencing the vehicle and the surroundings as they're going through, to when they're entering the vehicle, when they're exiting the vehicle, when they need to unlock the doors, et cetera, et cetera. So we spend hundreds of hours with drivers. We rode with them, listening to them, co creating with them, and to Emily's point about leadership's involvement with it all the way up to the current svp, Udit Madan, like, he was super focused on how that experience was actually gonna play out. I still remember this conversation focusing on the sound that the vehicle was gonna make as it was backing in neighborhoods and at what decibel do you want it? What is the exact tone of the sound and how many different options? And he was totally involved in that conversation of sort of going, where do you want it to play out? And all the testing that went into it. Um, but then thinking through the driver experience itself, it was everything from, like, how does the air conditioning work in the vehicle? We have grown to think about air conditioning just coming through the front vents. You have a temperature that's set, and that's how it operates. And what we realized very quickly is with the way drivers operate, with them going from stop to stop, as they're going through, there's a shorter window for the driver to cool down as they've gone out and come back into the vehicle. So very quickly we got into this mode of thinking about, you know, work around human engineering and how human bodies react to cooler, wet temperatures and things, which led us to the point of going to Build this air conditioned seat where you have cold air blowing onto the neck of the driver, which is sort of the first place where you want the cooling to come in and is the most effective way for a driver to go through that process to other things which seem quite simple now. But when we hear from drivers all day long, it's quite satisfying to see them talk about it. Our key fobs were built in a way that there are proximity sensors in the door and in the key fob so that when the driver exits the vehicle, they don't have to fumble around with the key fob, lock, unlock or do any of that thing when they're approaching the vehicle. The vehicle knows they're approaching it, auto unlocks for them and helps them get in sort of simple things along those realm, which makes a big difference to a driver's day itself. But. But even some things that most people don't notice, but things that we were thinking a lot about, like we talk a lot about the floor mats within the vehicle. We spent so much time thinking about the floor mats that go on because it needed the right coefficient of friction to make sure that they get the grip that they need as they're walking in and out of the vehicle. But it needs the right cushioning at the same time, considering how much time they're spending on that floor mat itself. So it's all of these little things that looking back at it were sort of. We were like, I wonder whether anybody would notice those as they come through. But we hear from drivers all the time about these tweaks that have been made, um, through that journey. But then the evolution as well, the point that Emily was making. With every package that we deliver, with every route that goes on, we are constantly learning. There's data that's constantly coming back and we are constantly learning how do we apply those learnings going into the vehicle. Which is what led to, as Emily pointed out, the software defined vehicle. And our partnership with these remains because with these updates, we can continuously push updates into the fleet over the air without pulling a single van off the road. And the van that a driver gets today can be meaningfully different than the one they got yesterday or that they took on the route yesterday. And we get to do that without having to have to replace the vehicle. And then with all the AI uh, capabilities that over the last couple of years have come into place, you get to simulate all the data, understand how these things are evolving and how it looks different in different parts of the country and make the fleet smarter and more Efficient. And that really compounds as we scale with every vehicle, with every route, we continue to learn more and more and continue to help improve that experience over time. So that's been super fun to see. Um, you know, us close the loop on it and see how. See how drivers in the community has been reacting, has been a fun journey to be, uh.

Speaker A: Oh, that sounds amazing. And I can totally see the compounding effect with all the data of having now 50,000 vehicles on the road, different types of vehicles. The thing that jumps out to me, Tom, as you're describing, the air conditioning case hits your neck first in all the thoughtful detail. I often think as a consumer, it's like there's all these people at this company. Like, doesn't this company just like sell stuff? You know, and yet you have like to sell stuff in like the most efficient, effective at the scale. There's all this incredible work that goes on that is so innovative to just make ultimately the delivery of that package as seamless and delightful for the customer. It's kind of an amazing thing, just the scope of it all.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: M. Do you guys feel that when you're in the. Do you ever just be like, oh yeah, this thing started selling books three decades ago and now we're doing this just feel like normal.

Speaker C: It's one of those humbling, thankful moments that you sort of reminisce over where you're looking at it and you're going, wow. We started on this journey with a particular goal in mind and we've been building upon it. And when you hear from people who are driving the vehicle every day, you're sort of blown away by both the responsibility that you've given, but thankful for the opportunity and the work that the teams put in to be able to drive that constant innovation and constant learning. And there's so much more that we can do. So that's the other thing that keeps us, keeps us excited and back into work every. Every week as we get through. Because every time you're like, oh, there's this little thing that we can do better and that'll make it better for drivers, that'll make it better for the environment, that'll make it better for the communities that we serve.

Speaker A: Emily, from your view, moving to an electric fleet or much more, you know, of this massive global electric fleet, what does that mean when you're in this transition from kind of gas powered infrastructure to electric vehicles at that scale, what changes on an operational basis?

Speaker B: Everything. A whole lot. I mean, I think infrastructure is one of the big things that you hit on at the end there. Obviously, to get ready to deploy all of these electric vehicles into the wild, as we sometimes say, we needed to figure out a playbook to scale charging infrastructure rapidly. We'd already built hundreds of delivery stations at that point when we were ready to deploy these vehicles. And so this was largely go back work rather than, of course, we were also intercepting new launches that were coming online and those are somewhat easier to manage. You already have construction teams going on site and leveling parking lots and doing all of those sorts of things. But establishing the playbook to one partner with folks like utilities to kind of share our forecast for demand so that we're never kind of chasing power across the horizon was a key thing that we needed to nail down from the very beginning. Um, going back to this theme of standardization that was really critical in terms of scaling so standardizing the design of the infrastructure into, we sometimes refer to it as Lego blocks that can just be added on to one another depending on the sort of size of the site and how many vehicles there are to deploy. Obviously this was all very critical in us hitting this 50,000 vehicle milestone. We hit the charging milestone about six months ago. So we're obviously working a little bit in advance of vehicle deployment and super proud of the team's efforts there. If you think about the downstream implications as well of having charging as your source of energy rather than gas and stopping at a gas station, it gets really interesting. So now we've had to create energy estimation models for every route that is happening across the US to determine where are EV eligible routes existing today. Based on the vehicle, we have the battery pack and the energy that it can deploy over the course of a given route. We had to build those models from scratch, considering not just payload, but also temperature, elevation, gain, et cetera, to sort of inflate where we should put these vehicles first. And then there comes the same modeling, but that occurs at the daily level to ensure we're not sending an EV out, uh, on a route that it can't complete and drivers get stranded because obviously temperatures change and our routes are not perfectly consistent day over day. And so there's a ton of science work to actually make this happen on sort of the planning horizon as well as the day to day execution, um, horizon that I find super fascinating. And then I think resiliency is another thing that this has made us think fundamentally differently about. When chargers aren't working, it's not quite as simple as just like finding your nearest gas station in all cases. And so We've had to just build a ton of sort of tooling and processing around triaging outages that we may experience developing on road charging networks that we can go to when we experience outages mobile charging solutions. So these are just a few of the infrastructure related things that we've had to think differently about. Maintenance is another big one. We've had to work extremely closely with Rivian to sort of be in lockstep with us as we've expanded our deployments. As you can imagine, some of the places that we deploy our EDVS is not necessarily where Rivian's consumer vehicle demand is like the most dense. And so they've had to follow our lead in some cases to expand maintenance infrastructure and networks, certify other shops to again kind of contribute to that, that scaling. And then lastly, even something as simple as driver training in many cases this is the first time a driver will have driven an EV is when they start delivering with a Rivian. I've talked to drivers that this is their case of like regen braking is something that takes a little bit of getting used to. And so we have sort of uh, a specialized training processes um, before EVs go live at a given station to help set everyone up for success. Essentially.

Speaker A: I come back to that same mental model of we're having this conversation today because Amazon has hit this major milestone, 50,000 electric vehicles. And you want to talk about the electric vehicle, we're talking about this Rivian truck. There are other types of vehicles which are so interesting, which we're going to also talk about. And you're having this conversation, you're like, okay, yeah, I've seen those trucks. I think that they're really cool. I've seen them on the road. Uh, it's about EVs and then you have to step back and say what makes that possible? Just like you're talking about Emily, you can get your heads around, oh, okay, so you had to go deploy a bunch of chargers. But then it's like, wait a second, you had to map every route in America for all of these different variables. I mean you're probably not mentioning all of them, but temperature, uh, topography, altitude, all of that science to get a sense of like if we're going to do this, you know, and make the investment in the billions and billions of dollars and then actually still do it to fulfill the promise ultimately for the customer. Because the customer doesn't care if the vehicle runs out of charge. Right? That's not the customer's problem. That's just going to make them angry. It just all has to work.

Speaker B: It's incredibly complex. We are introducing uh, two new variants this year as well. So a larger battery pack as well as all whee drive. And so again, more science modeling to determine like where should you deploy those variants over the one that you have. And it's too fascinating.

Speaker A: Did you want to add to that, Tom? Looked like you had something to say.

Speaker C: No, it's hit it on the, on the nose. You think about all the things that are within our control to a certain extent and then you've got all the things that are not within our control. Everything from Emily mentioned the Rivian infrastructure and getting their repair facilities going. But you also need to have other people like repair shops that can handle aluminum versus being able to handle the normal consumer vehicles that they're dealing with. People who can handle high voltage batteries and how they need to be treated. Even simple things like a tire change, like how does a tire change within an electric vehicle get done? Is not something that if you're in an area where there's not a lot of electric vehicles, there are not people who can handle it easily enough. So it was a bit of, you know, bring the ecosystem along with you to be able to carry this across the board because you can do everything within our four wall and get much better with it, et cetera. But once they go out into the wild and they're out delivering packages, you've got to make sure that the service infrastructure is set up in a way that they can provide you with the. And it's also, uh, you know, drivers learning about, um, range and how do they think about range and when they're working through it and they're working through their delivery cycle, like how do they work through and the number of variables that can come in, like the streets of the highways at 10am feel very different than the highways at 3pm or the highways at 6pm at that standpoint. And our models being able to iterate and evolve across the day to be able to go, okay, now that I have this much kilowatt hours of battery life left, I know of energy left in it, I know I can get to this spot or I need to go on to an on road charging spot, or how do I need to handle the day based on what I know is going to happen. And being able to predict that for our models has been fun. It's kept us humble. There's a lot of things that we think about and there's a lot of things that we learn. Applying the learnings but we still, there are moments where we're just like, oh, never thought that that would, that we needed to think about that, that angle as well as we're, as we're going through our routing models.

Speaker A: So given all of that and what you're describing and what goes into figuring out, okay, where do we roll this out first, how do we scale this up? Where are we going to go really like deep and dense with our network. Where is Amazon today? Where is this fleet?

Speaker C: We've got the advantage of now having it done for a few years. So that comes with a bit of the easy spots are done. The low hanging fruit is we have done with those and now it moves into the more complex environments now some of it because we knew we were clear on where we wanted to go. Like Emily, um, said infrastructure is usually the first so question to go answer. And with the work that we've been able to do with utility companies, we've had now years of things where they've seen what our requirements are likely to be. They've been able to build both power as well as the infrastructure to get power close to our stations themselves. But that continues to evolve as the journey. And then once you get that then you get into the real work of putting the infrastructure into the ground. And as anyone who's gone into either our home construction stuff or, or into these commercial construction pieces, you never know what you're going to find when you dig into the ground. It's always, you know, every site that we have gone through, it's always funny. It's all got its own journey that it goes on because there's permitting that's involved, there's detailed work that as you dig in you might find that weren't unmapped, that weren't mapped in there, that we need to evolve, learn and apply as we go through. So we've been doing that and we've been, we've got now, like Emily said, thousands of cities that we're in, 50,000 charges that are involved that are already uh, deployed just in the US alone, you know, with 2.4 billion packages last year. And that number keeps increasing as we're delivering on an ongoing basis. So now we're in a mode of we have to get it all around the country. And so how do we solve those more tricky problems as we work through. So the two places where we have seen more challenging things that we have had to work on outside of power was all wheel drives has been where, when you think about rural areas and vans having to go through those rural environments, sometimes you have to be able to get provided with capabilities that don't exist in a pure single wheel drive. Rivian's worked with us and they're launching the all Wheel drive vehicle later on this year. We're super excited about it. It sort of opens up different parts of the country, both in terms of dealing with sort of terrain that's more difficult to operate in rainy or normal temperatures, but also in winter, getting out into colder places and being able to run through better safety options. But then in addition to that, it's also been the battery. Like we are constantly in the mode of how do we get packages to customers safer, faster and more efficiently. So in that journey, while on road, charging becomes an option, it also slows us down in terms of being able to get that to customers. So we are excited about the larger battery pack that's going to be launched this year and that enables us again to widen the zones that we can take electric vehicles to and deploy them as we get through. So it's sort of using all of that information, using all the data that's coming in. We've got to go from everything. Like you said, the hills of San Francisco, cold snowy flats of Minnesota, whether you're dealing with the dry heat of Phoenix or you're in the humidity of Florida, we've got to figure out how to make these work through in those environments in a way that's comfortable for drivers, but at the same time gets us the packages to customers on time, consistently and efficiently as we get through. So as we enter the markets, we become more prepared with it. We are able to use AI to simulate all those different environments because again, we've got vans delivering in all of those markets as we speak. So we can collect all of that information and go, here's what a new market is going to encounter. And we end up using AI to sort of simulate that and understand what are those little tweaks that we want to make? Because no, we've not found any area that's exactly the same as another as we work through. You know, you got some templates that you can start with, but within every area you end up having to do some tweaks as you work through, both in the routing algorithms as well as in the vehicle itself in terms of how it deals with those environments. And that's been fun. So we are continuing that journey. We're ramping up across the country. And that's the fun part of it. As you get through these unique environments, how do you. How do you evolve both the vehicle and, and our routing pieces and our operations to get there.

Speaker A: Yeah, so I, I can see it's thinking about, okay, well, how do we make the vehicle, um, how do we, what can we do to make it more robust and therefore go into markets that we really want to serve in the way we want to serve them? How do we think about battery range and advancements that are happening there that are also a huge unlock. Understandable. How do we think about just the diversity of terrain in the world? Right. That not every place might be sort of close and similar in many respects, but every place is going to be different. All of that has to be taken into account. And then the other aspect that I find just utterly delightful to me is thinking about the fact that when we're talking about the Rivian van, we've done one show, maybe two shows on Drayage and the push for electric vehicles in our ports and what's happening at the ports. And I know that's something that Amazon has been working on in Southern California with the biggest types of semi trucks, and I know there's a push there. But then when I look at three wheel vehicles that are Amazon electric vehicles or two wheel, Right. This sort of micro mobility or just what's the right vehicle for every use case, whether it's like taking giant containers off of cargo ships to this vast range that you can cover, like we're talking about with the Rivian fleet, which I think is now at 30,000 or surpassed 30,000 vans, and then last mile micro mobility touching all of that too. That is just like endlessly fascinating to me. Emily, can you talk about that and the push there and the different kinds of form factors that you developed?

Speaker B: I'll start perhaps with the mental model and just sort of the point that you were getting at, which is that as we've grown our transportation network, we've realized there is no one size fits all solution here. And we try and let the route as well as the environment in which it's operating determine the right vehicle for that route. Generally, density of both sort of population as well as customer demand as well as road infrastructure are going to be the big drivers of what is the right vehicle for a given application. The former is going to determine how much physical space and energy do you need to deliver a given set of packages or volume, and then the latter is playing a large role in determining the most effective kind of form factor. To your point, whether what is the parking infrastructure like in that given place? Are there bike lanes that can be used and how effective are using those as compared to the sort of more traditional road infrastructure? How is traffic in that city? And so what we're finding is that uh, our vans are a really good fit for the majority of our volume. But as we are continuing to improve speed for customers, the other thing that's happening is that a subset of our routes are actually becoming shorter, less packages. They don't need as much space and energy. And these offerings skew towards these very dense urban metros. So if you think about cities like New York, London, Tokyo, we found that micromobility, which is our sort of generalized term for anything that's not a more traditional vehicle. So bikes, walker model, um, and when I say bike, I really mean like two wheel, three wheel or four wheel. We have all of those and everything in between. Uh, we find that those are a great option in really dense urban metros like that. Sort of because of all of those three things that I said earlier, like density is super high and so you don't actually lose as much on road time going to and from the station if that is needed because the customer demand is just so dense as well as the benefits from having a smaller form factor for both sort of maneuverability in a congested urban environment as well as packaging really are huge pros for that model in those dense urban cities. A couple milestones that we've hit in some of them. Now, the vast majority of grocery delivery in New York is done on E bikes, which is pretty cool. We have 70 micromobility hubs around the world and 50 plus European cities. So we're seeing a lot of success in that model. In India they hit 10,000 EVs which is really this two three, four wheeler form factor again largely driven by those things, density and then the road infrastructure and characteristics of that Geo. As you also noted, we're in the pilot and experimentation phase of bringing electrification into heavy duty trucking, whether that be in Yard Hustlers, which I would actually characterize that as kind of getting out of pilot mode and getting into the ready to scale territory, which is really exciting, as well as the Class 8 over the road trucks. So we're really excited about taking on that as our next big challenge in this domain.

Speaker A: I'm um, hearing you talk about it and thinking about India and I've read that there's a lot of scooters because scooters is one of the main modes of transportation, two wheeled scooters just for the Indian population. So Amazon is moving to two wheeled scooters as a Form factor and figuring out, okay, well where are bike lanes and can we do EV bikes? And does that make the most sense like you're talking about in certain places? Maybe Food delivery is now happening primarily on electric vehicles. It's just cool because it's integrating into also like the local culture in many ways. Right. Uh, you can't just like plop a giant van on a street that has a whole bunch of two wheeled scooters and expect you're going to get your delivery on time. So it's also taking. There's a cultural context for how those vehicles get deployed as well. Whether that's a super conscious thought or it's just like, no, this is sort of the operating reality. We have to fit the locale right with the vehicles that make sense for that specific locale.

Speaker B: And I think it's on both sides, sort of the business model as well as the logistics model that's common in those GEOs. And why I say that is India is really the world leader in this emerging segment we call quick commerce. So delivery in under 30 minutes. It's an area that's been growing extremely quickly in the last five years in India and we've made a huge investment in the last two to three years. And so when you're delivering in under 30 minutes, you're only carrying one to two packages because you need to go back and get the next order. And again, that requires less cargo space. And so again that just lends itself to that local form factor that's so prevalent. So it's really on both sides, that local nuance that you talk about, business model and logistics model.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's really interesting given all that we've talked about what the experience is like for a Amazon driver in a Rivian van and kind of the uh, thoughtfulness that has gone into designing that experience. I'm curious as well. When this fleet of vehicles is now out on the road, are you getting feedback? Are you taking, are you surveying? Like, is there a community response to now having fewer gas powered vans and delivery trucks in neighborhood, maybe going to ev? Does it mean something in terms of customer perception? What have you learned as a result of this?

Speaker C: It's super interesting. Whenever we go into new areas with the uh, electric vans themselves, you can see sort of a, uh, bit of a, uh, bubbling up of emotion as you're working through. And drivers will talk about it a fair bit when they're going out to do deliver and the new trucks, uh, customers just love them. When they walk up, you'll hear all about like the cute front that's on there and the smile in the front of it and how they feel about the blinking eyes is what they call it sometimes when we put on the light. So we'll see a lot of those, those kind of things come through about, about sort of the, the, the cuteness factor or the newness factor as these vehicles come into play. But then you also start hearing these points about, you know, there, there's a story that a friend of ours told us at one point and then across, uh, customer feedback coming through as well. They had the situation that whenever an Amazon man came in to do deliveries, their dogs would always come out barking and get all disturbed as they're coming through. And now that the Rivian vans are coming in they're like, we're so thankful. The dogs are super calm. They're not upset about it at all. So you hear these interesting nuggets about the impact that this is having on the communities. But people also always talk about the fact that they feel better about the fact that these packages are getting delivered with no emissions and coming through. So you'll hear that sentiment come through um, as well, periodically. But the overwhelming piece with the drivers is constantly like we find that drivers as they start driving this, they appreciate it so much and they appreciate all these little nuances that are built into the vehicle that there's always. We joke sometimes when you go to some stations, drivers, all the DSPs will talk about the delivery service providers will talk about how drivers sometimes compete for getting these vehicles where they're like, we'd rather drive these vehicles rather than others. Which is always an interesting uh, validation to get through the process. But DSPs also talk about how it's been in terms of recruiting as they've gone through the process of recruiting drivers for it, uh, the fact that they have these vehicles that are much appreciated compared to others that might be out there doing last mile deliveries, how much they find easier to, in terms of the recruiting approach itself and how much that has been a boon in playing through. But the last piece as well is with the regulators. And those conversations like the, we've had a number of conversations with different regulators in different parts of the country, the D.C. department or the District Department of Transportation, like working with them and sort of understanding the challenges that they're dealing with is what led us to the part of the deployment of these micro mobility solutions and the e bikes into D.C. itself and the rollout, um, into D.C. and how we coming together with uh, city officials can actually solve problems um, that are even much bigger than sort of our own things that we are trying to go out and achieve. Has been quite rewarding to be able to see how private enterprise, with government and with communities coming together to solve what is really one party couldn't solve alone and coming together and getting to those outcomes has been very rewarding to see and continue to build on.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm glad you raised that, Tom, because in our final few minutes I, uh, wanted to pivot the conversation and talk about the climate pledge that Amazon Co founded 2019 with global optimism. And just given the scale of what you're describing and the push. So the climate pledge get to Net 0 by 20, 20, 40, 10 years ahead of the timetable set through the Paris agreement. Very, uh, ambitious goal. Hundreds and hundreds of signatories, giant companies to that pledge as well. And it has teeth. It's really interesting just to see how Amazon frankly delivers. This was not in a world where we can be somewhat skeptical. You can see how this is unfolding. Um, very interested to understand what the, in this regard to EV fleet, the kinds of conversations that happen. Are companies coming to talk to you to understand how might they do this? What would it mean if they were going to move their fleet in this direction? What is that dynamic like when we

Speaker B: announced the climate pledge, as well as our commitment to uh, delivering or to buying 100,000 electric delivery vans? I see it as a reflection of two things. One, that we believe really strongly in the power of these demand signals to encourage sort of investment as well as innovation. And then two, that we are not afraid of scale. To your point, like that part of it is not something that scaling quickly is not something that scares us away. And we ultimately know and appreciate that it is a core component of a accelerating the technology and cost curves in these more nascent areas. I think on the supplier side, as, uh, I mentioned earlier, we've seen a big uptick in EDV options around the world with many traditional OEMs as well as new OEMs in the space, which we view as a really positive sign. Like they've said, okay, people are serious about doing this, but they're actually doing. And so that has driven investment on the supply side. And we believe that more supply is better for the ecosystem. It gives companies options because similar to us, there is no one size fits all solution. We similarly have seen maturation in the charging industry and we've seen companies be willing to not just sell us, uh, product in a transactional sense, but co develop and innovate with us which again is just like another sign that the industry is taking our demand signal and they're, and they're willing to invest. And we see that as a really positive thing for other players that are looking to do this, they're going to have more options at better price points and be able to have a, uh, seat at the table, should they choose to, through avenues like the Climate Pledge, to sort of collaborate on these new solutions. So that's a few things that we're seeing on the supply side. And as you mentioned, we are doing as much as we can to kind of share our learnings along the way with others that are looking to take on sort of similar ambitions. Part of the Climate Pledge group is how do we pool demand and kind of come to startups and ask them to solve these problems that we're facing in a shared way? So we look to send those demand signals not just at the Amazon level, but at a broader level, uh, again, because we believe so strongly in the power of scale in making these solutions economically viable. So we're excited by the conversations and the progress that we're seeing. And then perhaps lastly, I would just say that this whole journey in EDVs has become a playbook for us as well to emulate as we take on these additional problems in the space, like electrifying Class 8 trucks, et cetera. It's given us a good blueprint that we think we can emulate for climate solutions to come.

Speaker A: Well, I just want to thank both of you for your time, your work. This for me, has just been an extremely illuminating conversation. It's so inspiring to hear what you all are doing. 50,000 EVs and halfway to a 100,000 EV goal. What I appreciate is the way that you can humanize that ambition so that you can really understand what is it, the people doing it, what it means to do it, the innovation that it takes to do it. Some of it massive, some of it tiny, all of it having impact that really comes through. So thank you both for being on Supercool. Really enjoyed it.

Speaker B: Thanks so much for having us and

Speaker A: thank you for listening. If you're enjoying Supercool and appreciate our conversations that merge climate, innovation and business, please take a moment to subscribe and leave us a review. It's the best way you can help the show reach other future forward decision makers who would benefit from these conversations too. See you next time.