Driving Amazon’s electric delivery vehicle: Rivian EDV [video] | Hacker News Reader

Driving Amazon’s electric delivery vehicle: Rivian EDV [video]

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184 pointsbane178 comments

Is it safe to say that this video was, at minimum, approved by the Amazon PR department?

He has a lot of videos about delivering for Amazon on his YT channel. Some are a year old.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNcYFjn42AQIX76shX1qW...

I think the simplest explanation is that approval has happened for previous videos, as well, especially since the more videos, the less likely approval was not obtained.

I hope so, but doubt it. It is an unfortunate reality that people get fired for posting innocuous stuff like this on the internet.

Given not all packages are blurred all the time, and you can see the map at all, makes me think this is just him using the RPV (Rivian Prime Van) during his actual job tasks; i'd imagine Amazon would want all images of his list of stops to be blurred, since it's probably quite easy to pinpoint customer addresses via that map at 6:01. The reason it's a light load is explained in the description, so I doubt it was even specifically picked out for review:

> Why do I only have like 20 packages? On this particular day I was an extra driver, so I didn’t have a full route of my own.

Is this guy actually an amazon employee or did he just sign up for Amazon Flex just to make this video?

Great angles / production value - also cool to see this vehicle!

He said he has been "working for amazon" for a while. But dunno if he works for Amazon directly, A Amazon Delievery Partner or Amazon Flex. I'm sure he has said its only part time Atleast here in the UK you use your own vehicle when using Amazon Flex.

After 15:35, he says something like "...2 years ago when I first started working for Amazon...".

So he probably didn't sign up just to make this video.

Clueless about the Amazon Flex part (never heard of it, and I'm not in North America).

It is stereotypically Amazon to spend tens- or hundreds-of-millions to develop a fully-integrated next generation truck and then try to save ten bucks by putting the slowest possible CPU behind the head unit / infotainment system.

Even the R1T had initial impressions that the infotainment wasn't exactly super optimized. I think it's been improved but there's a reason Tesla can get away with such a barebones and average quality interior.

I blame bean counters for that kind of nonsense

Using a more powerful computer won't really change development costs all that much; but it could seriously affect BOM costs. Amazon wants to buy absurd numbers of this, so it's not unreasonable that they've tried to heavily cut costs in the BOM.

(Also what the other commenter said.)

I think that's a false economy.

Suppose a better infotainment system saves even one minute of time per day. Over a 300 day work-year, that's five hours of driver-work, valued on the order of $100 (at $20/hr). All other things being equal, $100 would go a long way in an infotainment BOM.

If this isn't being done for cost reasons, I expect it might be a result of bulk ordering. Rivian isn't a large car manufacturer, so it might not be ordering custom equipment from the manufacturers. If they have to compromise by taking an infotainment package wholesale from existing mass-production lines, then maybe there's no "$100-equivalent" upgrade on the market.

If working in the modern software industry has taught me anything, it's that developers can figure out how to write slow janky UIs no matter how powerful the processor.

I'd go so far as to say there's an inverse correlation here. My 100Mhz desktop had a more responsive UI than any computer I've used in the last 5 years.

Text editing on that 100Mhz computer felt responsive, typing characters had them appear on the screen instantly, I could copy+paste 100s of lines of text without a problem. Now, I load notion.so on a 4Ghz cpu, and typing is sluggish, scrolling has severe lag, and pasting 100 lines of text sometimes takes several seconds.

All this is me saying that I'm more inclined to blame software than to blame the hardware for UI lag.

I've always used vim for text editing (and programming languages that do not use JVM), never had a problem with responsiveness regardless of computer spec.

I'm going on record to suggest that people who have used computers from the 80's and 90's have rose tinted glasses on when remembering their experiences. Nostalgia is a bitch and lies to us all the time. Just loading a fucking program from a spinning disk hard drive adds a significant amount of startup time to programs that we've completely imagined away from the "golden age" of our computer usage. At this point I'm convinced it's just a natural extension of "they don't make it like they used to" which has plagued mankind for basically every generation ever which completely ignores survivor bias. I distinctly remember experiencing *major* performance gains when moving to more memory than my system and apps needed to use and the move to solid state drives. None of the "programmer's don't know how to code today" nonsense even comes close to eclipsing the performance gains from those two changes.

Both can be true at the same time. You can have a very slow program startup time but once it is up, it's very responsive to inputs.

But you are forgetting that you used to be able to smell your computer.

Part of it is rose-tinted glasses, sure, but it's not entirely rose-tinted glasses.

The "Living Computer Museum" in Seattle was (up until covid closed it) an excellent way to experience the past.

I had this same insight and feeling then. The old machines, running their old operating system versions, felt responsive and crisp compared to performing similar tasks on modern machines with modern software equivalents.

DOS programs loaded fast, since there was around 1MB of working memory. Granted they did not do much, but where responsive, except when needed to do real compute, then you just waited forever.

Windows 3x/9x with first real multitasking and swap - things got quite sluggish. Early browsers were particularly eager of gulping ram and bringing everything to halt.

Nowdays it feels somewhere in the middle with copious amounts of ram stuff can be fast once up and running, but it seems every app either wants to load from web on every step or tries to index your drive on every keypress.

Some things were better, some things worse. For example, I hated the thousand pound CRT monitors and love my thin LED hi res.

I also hated floppies. Squeek, squeek, grind, grind.

The old hard drives were fine, though.

It's just not monolithic. We've made serious improvements in a number of areas, but there are a few areas where we've clearly stepped backwards. Neither opinion really contradicts the other.

So it's funny you mention that. I own a couple of decidedly retro machines from the 90s, one runs DOS and the other runs Windows 98. These are used both for gaming and for productivity, both are equipped with solid-state drives as of late (I still have the original spinning rust.)

Both of these machines are many times more responsive than any thing put out in the last decade despite being thousands of times less powerful. The applications they run are made to serve my needs as a user 1st. It gets out of my way. The user interface is clearly designed for the mouse and keyboard I am obviously using. It is made to help me accomplish tasks more efficiently rather than stroking some designer's ego or chasing some fad. Most of the software I use was released "done" rather than released half-baked with the hope of future updates. I don't have to worry about having my privacy invaded.

It's not rose tinted glasses when I'm not wearing any and can look behind me and see the color. Modern mass-market technology is "worse is better" writ large.

Yes and no. I am now running an equivalent of a computer power that was once reserved for some dedicated government agency in early 90s[1]. I accept that some of that power is put to good use, but I do see wasted power in OS [2] and even games [3] on a semi-regular basis.

For the record, "they don't make em' like they used to" is an absolutely valid complaint. Note that now even with SSD, ridiculous memory and cpu, websites still manage to stutter ( but I accept online is its own animal ). Part of me wants to go over Windows releases as an example of resource use across generations ( and how they leaped ).

<<I distinctly remember experiencing major performance gains when moving to more memory than my system and apps needed to use and the move to solid state drives.

But do you still see it or is that performance assumed now ( making lazy design decisions easier )?

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/kdr3p6/how_would_amds_... [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg [3]https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/03/hacker-reduces-gta-on...

Try a text editor that isn’t built on top of Electron, perhaps.

That's kind of the point isn't it?

Personally, I would be ecstatic to ditch VSCode for some super fast native code thingy, but the truth is that it's often just a better experience. The ecosystem is big, and the performance is not all bad news (the ripgrep-based search is pretty damn impressive, and beyond that, it feels like VSCode has less issues with performance cliffs in normal use cases that I've encountered than a lot of older editors, including KDE's Kwrite and GNOME's Gedit, but even other Electron editors like Atom, too. It's not perfect, but there are times when I left Kate to VSCode because opening some file made Kate way too unresponsive.)

I just moved from VSCode to RubyMine for my Rails work because I was finding the Ruby plug-in ecosystem for VSCode to be too flaky. Performance in both have been fine for me, despite being built in JS and Java.

All that said, I really do miss TextMate.

OK, I will give you one thing: I do love Jetbrains IDEs. That said, I don't use them for everything. They use a lot of RAM for me when loading large projects, and they feel a bit awkward outside of "traditional" project structures that work well with VS Code.

I know Jetbrains is making a text editor, too. It does look very nice, but I have yet to try it.

This all being said, Jetbrains IDEs do still feel less responsive than more native stuff like Kwrite or Notepad++. It can be forgiven of course, but I think it's a valid point to note down, especially given how often people bring up that article comparing latency of desktop computers over time.

> All that said, I really do miss TextMate.

It's still there, no? https://macromates.com/

It is there, but seems to be essentially abandonware. The ‘mate’ command line tool to launch the app fails more than half the time on Apple Silicon, the plugins and bundles that exist are years out of date for Ruby and Rails, and I don’t expect it’ll ever get support for LSP.

So, sure, TextMate still exists. It’s still my default scratchpad for modifying text, and I even use it for some light scripting from time to time, but I don’t actually use it to build and maintain complex software any longer.

Looks like some people tried to port it to Tauri/Rust. I'm sold on VSC personally. Got my configs all setup. Runs on a phone (Mobian) ha.

Edit: I'm aware there's the browser one now built into GitHub.

The microcomputers I used in the 1980s, running on ~1MHz CPUs, were more responsive than everything that came after.

Here's a table with the input lag and release date of various computers: https://danluu.com/input-lag/

It seems like there might be a slight negative correlation (newer is worse). The data is fairly all over the place though.

...until you start comparing lag and CPU performance. Then it becomes obvious what kind of bloated software the world is producing.

And then you notice that recently there was an article pointing out that "software is IO-bound anyway" is no longer true, and this claim - for the first time since I remember - wasn't laughed out of the room. I await a more detailed study, but it seems quite likely the article was correct: IO is quite fast these days, and software is likely to be CPU-bound, particularly on parsing stuff as it's being read and operated on.

Wasn't the limiting factor RAM latency? Anyway, yes, computers parse way too much JSON, SQL, and whatever else. I've recently started working with gRPC, and boy is it nice. The current paradigm where every action requires a text blob to be written, compressed, then sent to a server that decompresses it, parses it, acts on it, then creates a new text blob that is compressed and sent out... It's a bit much. And that's before ypu add load balancers and microservices. gRPC cuts down on the parsing and compressing bits, but it's still quite wasteful.

I seem to remember that a good pencil has lag on the order of 1ms (how long it takes the tip to settle out after high speed motion), but I don't remember where this number came from, so it's untrustworthy.

I always view the IBM selectric as "beyond the horizon" in terms of responsiveness: that's 25–30ms.

> I seem to remember that a good pencil has lag on the order of 1ms (how long it takes the tip to settle out after high speed motion), but I don't remember where this number came from, so it's untrustworthy.

Not sure what lag there is on actual pencil, but there's this somewhat famous video[0] from Microsoft Research, where they test various values of input lag on a touch screen, and demonstrate that even 10ms is noticeable - but 1ms is about enough for it to feel instant. With 1ms lag, drawing on a tablet seems to feel just like drawing on paper (I personally haven't had an opportunity to test a tablet with 1ms lag, so I can't tell).

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

Its whoever wins, forces his policies on the other department. If controlls team buys the cheapest hardware, the force the dev team to be competent economic wise, else the software team can hire jsunior and get away with it.

The text editor on my DOS machine would load instantly. It was also only 56K in size.

Edlin was 2K and for a year or two was my main editor.

I wasn't willing to go that far!

It still would, if you were willing to use a text editor in DOS.

Actually, the same editor recompiled for modern machines also loads instantly!

https://github.com/DigitalMars/me

Text editing on that 100Mhz computer felt responsive...

Of course it did, because you were only editing the text. If you switch off syntax highlighting, linting, autocomplete, type checking, git integration, spell checking, grammar checking, and everything else your editor is doing then you can experience the joy of fast typing again.

A 4GHz CPU is only 40 times faster than a 100MHz CPU (not that clock speed is the important bit here, but whatever), but you're asking it to do probably about 20,000 times more computation every time you press a key. And then you complain that it's too slow!

There's not an option to switch various features off in many contexts.

It is a requirement imposed upon me that I write documents in notion, and that text editor doesn't let me import locally written files since it doesn't have any lossless textual representation. I can't avoid the laggy text editor. It's a requirement that I use slack, and no combination of settings for the browser or desktop client seems to stop massive input lag.

Typing into iOS or android's keyboard, in any text box, is an experience with very noticeable lag.

I know that the computer is doing thousands of times more things than my older computer did, but I don't want it to do that stuff and there's no way to turn it off while still participating in modern society (i.e. using a cell phone and working at a company).

I don't know if you've tried this, and it might very well not be easier per se, but you can separate writing your text from the "typesetting" by composing in a barebones editor and then pasting that text into wherever you need to display the text. I don't know if something as barebones as notepad exists for phones, but the method I've described might make your experience better on a desktop.

> but you're asking it to do probably about 20,000 times more computation every time you press a key.

[citation needed]

Emacs on my first computer, an i486 with a whopping 33 MHz of compute power had no trouble with syntax highlighting, autocomplete and spell checking.

The problem with slowness is in the design, not inproved functionality. The root cause is that modern software runs a ton of checks for every keystroke, tries to talk to the mothership every second and is designed to advertise and upsell instead of solving actual user problems.

TBF, Emacs/vim today with pretty much every feature turned on also don't feel sluggish.

I think the 2 issues hitting modern text editors are they are FAR too synchronous (they are doing the syntax highlighting, fonts, etc, with every keystroke rather than in the background).

And rendering has gotten WAY too nuts. Seems like all modern text editors are full blown web browsers, usually so they can be easily cross platform.

A modern 4GHz CPU is not only 40 times faster. It is a few thousand times faster than a 100MHz CPU back from the days. Probably not 20,000, but at least 2,000 times faster seems reasonable.

And responsiveness back then was so good, because your program was very close to hardware with very little in between if not running completely free from OS abstractions.

>your program was very close to hardware with very little in between if not running completely free from OS abstractions

This! It also meant that it was very very easy for any program or misbehaving driver to completely crash your system. Not to mention all the security implications of every app having direct hardware access.

But when I go look at my text editor being slow, I can see that the amount of CPU time spent dealing with the kernel is less than a tenth of it. So that's not the reason.

That's not how latency or responsiveness works.

Dan Luu did cool experiments with input lag (https://danluu.com/input-lag/).

It's a much better estimate than hand waving about memory isolation.

If we want to talk about how things work directly, my program can get things to the GPU in far less than a millisecond. The safety layers are not the problem.

Can you show your working on this? Because a 100MHz CPU can do 100,000,000 things a second, and a 4GHz CPU can do 4,000,000,000 things a second, and if my math's right, that means the 4GHz CPU can do 40 times as many things a second at the 100MHz CPU.

Now, you might argue 'the 4GHz CPU is multicore!', and so sure, maybe we're up to 8 times 40, which is, I'm pretty sure, 320. And maybe you'll say that the cache is bigger, so you'll be able to keep the data pipelines full and get more done on the faster CPU. But how are you getting to 'at least 2,000'?

While it's harder to calculate, that 4Ghz CPU comes with vastly faster RAM, busses, and disk. Not many 100 MHz systems around with NVMe or even SATA...

Sure. I'll oversimplify a lot, but the feeling of how things work should be correct.

The clock frequency is not a good way of measuring performance. Never was. Even earlier designs as the 8086 did not do one thing (instruction) every cycle. They did far less.

Modern CPUs are extremely complex beasts that can take in a lot of instructions. They take a good look on those instructions, change them in a way that does not alter the result but makes some optimizations possible and then distribute those instruction to a bunch of internal workers that can work on those at the same time. More on this can be found in the wikipedia rabbit hole starting with instruction level parallelism.

One way to measure this is to look at how many of a selected set of instructions per cycle can be done. An 8086 could do 0.066. A 386DX did 0.134, a 486 could do 0.7. A Pentium 100 already could do 1.88, and so on. Modern CPUs get to 10, per core.

But wait, there's more. This comparison gives only a very rough idea of a CPUs capabilities since it focuses on a very specific thing that might have little to do with actual observed performance. Especially since modern CPUs have extremely specialized instructions that can do enormous amount of computations on enormous amounts of data in little time. And there we are in the wonderful world of benchmarks that may or may not reflect reality by measuring execution time of a defined workload.

Passmark does CPU benchmarks and their weakest CPU in the database seems to be a Pentium 4 @ 1.3GHz. Single Core, single thread. It comes in at 77 (passmarks?). An i7-13700 is rated with 34,431. Does that make it 500 times faster than the 1.3GHz P4? Hard to tell, but its a hell of a difference. And from the P4 to a Pentium or even a 486 running at 100Hz ... at least another hell of a difference.

We can also try Dhrystone MIPS, another benchmark. Wikipedia has - strangely enough - numbers for the Pentium and the 486 at 100MHz: 188 MIPS for the Pentium, 70 MIPS for the 486. The most modern (2019!) desktop cpu entry comes in around 750,000 MIPS. A Threadripper from 2020 over 2,300,000 MIPS.

So, how much more can a modern CPU do than an ancient one? A lot. And especially a lot more than you would expect from the faster frequency alone. Even with only one core, it can do several hundred times the workload. And we got a lot of cores.

> you're asking it to do probably about 20,000 times more computation every time you press a key

If hinting, spellchecker and autocompletion takes so much computation you have terrible tooling. This kind of functions existed 25 years ago and they were real-time.

40 times faster seems fast on paper, but honestly I would love a CPU 4 million times faster.

No excuse for any of those things to slow down the actual typing.

And a lot of those computers did do fancy checking, and a modern CPU can do ten times the instructions per clock on top of having 6-8 cores.

A thousand times this. I die a thousand times a day waiting for software.

Exactly. Hardware was fast enough in 1969 to put men on the moon. In 2022 we have laggy text editors. That's not a hardware problem.

But that 1969 hardware did that one exact thing and nothing but. No networking, no displays beyond some digits, etc. It was a calculator. No one's calculator is running that large text editor, 20 Chrome tabs, Teams/Slack, Spotify... Yeah, nothing should lag these days but it's not really a valid comparison between today and the Apollo computer.

100MHz, so to be clear, we're talking about like an early Pentium. 1995ish.

So that 100MHz computer had maybe 8 or 16MB of RAM - it was struggling to run anything other than the text editor you were using - no, you aren't running an MP3 player in the background, winamp has not been released yet; no you are not running your email client in the background, you're on a 28.8K dialup modem and you are not hanging on the line on the offchance that mail arrives - you are dialing up, waiting 30 seconds for the modem to handshake, then watching your emails trickle in at a rate of one every few seconds.

The machine took noticeable time to seek and load or save to the hard disk, so it made up for that by trying to keep everything in RAM all the time, with the downside that if it crashed (and it frequently crashed) you would lose all your work since you last hit save.

So yes, the cursor responded right away when you pressed a key. But other than that, golden days, those were not.

Never mind that. What the hell is going on with the in truck efficiency and linking stops with app state? They could save so much “paper pushing” that drivers have to do if they just utilized organized cargo areas and GPS.

Maybe developer workstations should be less powerful than production machines ;)

I Concur.

Especially UI developers should not have retina displays or 3x 43" 4K displays when developing web page layouts

They can have all of that for their editor and photoshop and whatever. However their actual preview monitor should be smallest cheapest monitor they can find.

Back when I was writing some quite heavy 3D software we would always test each release on a machine that was slightly below our advertised minimum spec to make sure it was at least usable there.

In every movie production edit bay will be a $100 Walmart flatscreen. Because making a video production look good in 4k ProRes is fairly easy. But the majority of your audience is going to watch it on that cheap screen or something similar.

It's pretty clear whoever designed this toy has never driven an actual cargo van or done any blue collar work in their life. That Tesla-style touchscreen for starters. I give it 3-6 weeks before it's shattered or fails. The look on the guy's face was priceless when he couldn't open the cargo door without walking over to the touchscreen and tapping an icon. As opposed to having a simple button on the door itself. Many late model cargo vans do share crappy infotainment systems with their passenger counterparts, but almost never use them for core or upfitter functions, just the radio.

Have you ever seen the inside of a Ford Transit van? They're remarkably pedestrian. Or a UPS truck, made from steel and brawn and not much else. These things need to be engineered to take a beating. Yet this has push-button start with a fob. (Keys are a much better choice for fleet vehicles, if not only for key management, they withstand abuse in the field much better than fobs, which are expensive and difficult to replace.)

What they should have installed instead is a cup holder for the sports drink urine bottle. Which you keep next to the cigarettes and burrito wrappers, to the left of the shitty basic FM radio with real knobs.

How are you supposed to use a touchscreen for basic functions whilst wearing gloves? This thing was designed by office-dwellers.

All they need is for Ford or Benz to turn their bare bones cargo vans electric and they'll be turning these Rivians into beer cans.

All they need is for Ford or Benz to turn their bare bones cargo vans electric

You mean like this?

https://www.ford.com/commercial-trucks/e-transit/

https://www.mercedes-benz.co.uk/vans/en/electric-vans

Yes exactly like that.

You'll notice the Ford Transit EV still retains the traditional mechanical key, and also features a simple locking glove box that works off the same key.

But why do that when you could make the glove box electronically locking via bluetooth proximity over the infotainment.

People have deluded themselves into believing that EV's must be packed with superfluous electronics and other futuristic garbage, whilst it's just the drivetrain that's different.

These vans have awful range.

I have an 18 year old VW T5 Transporter with light camper fitout, which will do 900km (550 miles) on a tank.

The Ford linked above claims 200km (120 miles) between charges, the Merc 95 miles.

These vans won't replace my can fory usecase, not yet, and not at that price.

They'd be reasonably for a delivery route I suppose.

Thankfully this article is about trucks :-p

> The Ford linked above claims 200km (120 miles) between charges, the Merc 95 miles.

200km is more than enough for a typical parcel delivery day.

If you can charge at home/base then, really, you only care about the range being sufficient for one day. I think 200km is enough for many, if not most, use cases.

Most of the Transits I see (in the UK) are not used to drive long distances in a day but to carry stuff around. Think electricians, plumbers, all those trades.

Even an Amazon delivery driver may not drive more than 200km a day. What they do is plenty of stops and I suspect it takes them hours to drive just 20km.

There's going to be a market for both.

The ones with less range can be smaller, lighter, and so less expensive. If all you need is 120 miles, there it is.

Someone will make one with a bigger battery.

Yeah, they're not targeting your use case. The vast majority of these vans, I suspect, are used for urban delivery or trades roles, where 200km is fine. 900km range vans are perfectly possible, but will be very expensive and most van users won't need them.

EDIT: Also, in many countries you can drive a van with a normal driver's license provided it's under, usually, 3.5 tonnes. Once you go over that you need a special license. 900kms worth of battery might make it difficult to fit a reasonable payload under the legal limit.

I think plugin hybrids are potentially great for the transition to full EV for people who need to drive long distances.

There are many people who never drive more than 100 miles a day. Why do they need a car with 200, 300 mile range? Not to mention we'll be investing in charging stations along the Interstates, so charge scarcity will be less of a problem.

Fleet vehicles are the perfect first adopters of EVs - they have been using alternative fuel sources for decades in the form of natural gas and LNG. They have short daily range, they go back to a central depot each shift.

It isn't awful range any more than a Mini has awful towing capacity for the person who never tows.

I rented an electric VW Transporter recently (think it's the same van as the Mercedes Sprinter), and it really felt like the future. It was just so nice to operate. Smooth, quiet, tons of torque, and will probably beating day after day with little to no servicing. Range wasn't massive, but for your typical daily urban delivery round that doesn't matter so much. It just made so much sense.

^^ This 10000x.

Sure there are some nice comforts and features that will make life easier for the operator, but on the whole it's a massive step backwards in actual durability, utility and usability.

> How are you supposed to use a touchscreen for basic functions whilst wearing gloves?

I don't know about this one, but some car touch screens can be operated with gloves just fine.

(They still suck in comparison to actual buttons and knobs, though)

Whoever decided to introduce touchscreens inside cars and vehicles should be chastised. Touchscreens inside a vehicle are akin to texting while driving for me.

> Touchscreens inside a vehicle are akin to texting while driving for me.

No it is quantifiably worse than texting. In fact it is worse than drinking and driving. [0]

[0] https://www.trl.co.uk/publications/interacting-with-android-...

Yep. I've passed on this generation of fully electric vehicles because none of them offer physical buttons to operate the climate control.

Automatic climate controls don't cut it--change directions such that the sun starts beating down on me and I'm going to need to turn up the fans beyond what automated systems would choose. Test driving the Tesla Model S, on two separate occasions while attempting to set the climate controls I almost got into a wreck--it not only is only on the touchscreen, but also buried under something like 5 menus. WTF? Volvo XC-40 and Mustang also have no climate control buttons. In my area, all the other electric cars have a waiting list longer than a year. I want to buy electric, but safety is paramount--driving a car is far and away the most dangerous thing I do on a daily basis and I'd like it to be as safe as possible. I ended up with a Subaru this time.

Hopefully someone will make an electric car with physical buttons for the climate controls.

> electric car with physical buttons for the climate controls.

I drive a VW e-up! for the same reasons. It is a simple city car with analog controls and it's perfect for the Berlin city.

The new Lyric has very nice tactile controls.

F150 Lightning (base model) has non-touchscreen UI.

People are programmed to recite "Like, Subscribe and Share". How are they supposed to do that in a bare bones reality?

>How are you supposed to use a touchscreen for basic functions whilst wearing gloves?

Ah there are touchscreen-friendly gloves now. Amazon has plenty in stock!

Delivery drivers already have to deal with that issue because everything is on smartphone/tablet.

Every set of touchscreen-friendly gloves I’ve tried stops working after a couple of goes in the washing machine.

> All they need is for Ford or Benz to turn their bare bones cargo vans electric

These are already a thing, at least in Europe. Ford only released theirs this year and the Mercedes ones are next year, I think, but Peugeot and Renault have had various electric vans out for a while; you see them around a good bit in Dublin.

There's a comment on the video from someone that has, though no mention of the touchscreen specifically.

"I used to deliver out here in the Bay Area. This Van has SO MANY improvements over the normal Transits and Fluid Vans. I absolutely LOVE the removal of the side door for the new passenger door space. It actually makes the most sense ever as someone who actually delivered. The spacing on the shelves is questionable to me however.... They are DEFINATELY less wide, the Transits could fit a tote on them with maybe a few inches of overhang."

Gotta have something for your promo doc on frugality if you’re going for L7

This fully explains my time working at a startup acquired by Amazon. We were provided the lowest spec macbook pro to the extent that lead engineers were literally waiting around for hours every day waiting for builds to complete. Some couldn't even use two monitors due to display output limitations.

Anyone who has worked for amazon is fully aware of how the company internals being literally held together with duct tape.

Amazon's religion is measurement. This is a return to Taylorism, "Scientific Management," and the Bedaux System. But they won't see the problem with that unless they try to measure the efficacy of measuring everything.

I didn't realize Topher Grace was having that much trouble finding work. Should have invested his That 70s Show earnings better.

Didn’t you see Ocean’s Eleven? He undoubtedly lost it all card tables (“all red!”).

This is great content. His enthusiasm is infectious.

A basic, simple point on Web page user interface design: (1) Easily 1+ billion computer users understand the HTML controls. (2) Initially maybe only the front end developer understands the novel controls they develop with JavaScript.

Lesson: Use JavaScript where necessary or where it really helps a lot and otherwise stay with just the HTML controls.

Software is always the problem: https://youtu.be/3TFz1xqp3us?t=175

When will they learn?

I fail to see the ROI / advantage Amazon gets out of building highly specialized delivery vehicles. Sure, they look pretty and branded, but the actual task of moving boxes of stuff is fulfilled perfectly well by a Ford Transit + companion app. Maybe there's a slight efficiency improvement, but seems nowhere near the massive investment + maintenance required for a specialized truck.

The same could be asked about the USPS designs custom vehicles, or why UPS has special package cars with changes from a default box van.

The other piece that I think is important and not regarded high enough is that delivering for Amazon is all-in-all a rough job physically and mentally (considering that Amazon is at the height of metrics-driven companies and will shit on you for missing your number by 1), so there is an incredibly high chance that they will use these to boost morale (and already are -- Amazon has different tiers of vans internally that drivers work through as they progress at the company [with the new Rivian vehicles being at the top of the tier list], so surely it's being used as some incentive -- "hey check out this new electric van that we want you to drive, it has heated seats and steering wheel ;)".

Plus, this is the type of company who cares about 1-2% optimization long-term because of scale. Maybe the lower step of the Rivian van causes a 3% decrease in hip-originated workers compensation claims, idk.

Also EVs are so much cheaper to run than gasoline delivery vehicles, especially if your routes are stop and go -- that's worse-case for a gas engine, but EVs love it because of regenerative braking.

>the actual task of moving boxes of stuff is fulfilled perfectly well by a Ford Transit

Former UPS driver here. Our performance was measured in SPORH, or Stops Per On Road Hour. Supervisors will touch base with you and quote metrics like how many seconds it took you to go from the turning off the vehicle to entering the cargo area, or from pressing the key fob to enable the ignition switch to pulling off. The point is, all of these optimizations add up when you are performing them 200+ times per day. Driving a Ford Transit vs one of these Rivian EDVs or a P1200 package car would mean employing 2-3x the workers.

>Maybe there's a slight efficiency improvement, but seems nowhere near the massive investment + maintenance required for a specialized truck.

Just the sliding pocket passenger-side door is a massive improvement over any non-specialized vehicle. Think of the investment divided by the number of drivers, not as a lump-sum. As for maintenance, UPS and USPS both have in-house mechanics, I'm sure the same is true of Amazon.

Rivian made these, designed in collaboration with Amazon. There are a few points that make this a straightforward choice from an outsider's perspective.

- There's the efficiency and morale improvements, which others mentioned.

- There's also the better data tracking they'll have to make future improvements on all aspects of the delivery process.

- Amazon purchased 100,000 of these as well as equity (warrants I assume) in Rivian, so they received some of the upside after helping Rivian scale.

- Finally, I believe most (all?) of these delivery companies are contracted by Amazon and lease the vehicles from Amazon, so I'm sure they can make the unit economics work.

Is that a camera in the middle of the left A pillar there (1:39)? It looks like it's maybe blinking IR.

The comments on this video are wild.

errr by wild you mean grossly domesticated.

I like his vibe. This is really well done.

can't wait till these chassis start getting the RV treatment

More space than the VW ID Buzz. Interesting…

Hope the battery won’t catch fire cuz someone will be sleeping in it

Do you say “hope the gas tank won’t explode” anytime someone sleeps in an ICE car?

Are you aware that battery igniting while car parked is exceedingly rare?

Do you always convey ideas using condescending questions?

I make this mistake a lot, so don't feel too offended.

Only when the presented premise is clearly stupid and based on 100% faulty data.

"OMG what about battery fires!" is so worn out in the EV discussions I don't bother to be nice when rebutting it.

Hehe, there was a fire in a parking garage next to an airport in Norway a few years ago which basically destroyed the garage and all cars inside. People were really quick to blame it on an EV igniting and raving about how EV's should be banned from parking garages and on and on for days until investigation showed the fire started in a diesel car.

(Granted, the many EV's in there made the fire much harder for fire fighters to put out)

Same with the story of a city in Germany banning EVs from parking garages because there was a fire in one.

The fire was started by an ICE car :D

I do not! But I feel like we should not be kind to misinformation and false innuendo.

Are you aware that a car parked isn't at all the same scenario?

It is not like remodeling an RV is going to affect the gas tank. But it sure will make a difference to the battery usage. A gas tank doesn't age in the same way as a battery either, and we don't have as much experience with the kind of battery packs used in cars either (and they differ wildly between models).

Probably less rare than a fuel tank spontaneously exploding. Has an ICE car manufacturer ever recalled a vehicle and said don't park it inside until you get it recalled?

All the time. I've owned several cars which have had "don't park it inside" kind of recalls. All of them ICE cars. I've had a neighbor's house burn down because of a "don't park in your garage" issue that led to a recall; once again an ICE car not an EV.

Yes actually - it resulted in an absolutely bonkers story too:

https://jalopnik.com/how-one-suv-fire-destroyed-45-million-i...

I have an ICE class B and I keep looking at EV trucks for my next rig, but I just want a van, man!

Very excited about these.

I’ve built two camper vans, but my daughter is begging me to build one with these vans. I told her as soon as they go on surplus lol

I think it might be really tricky though. Ostensibly the battery warehouse is in the base of the van, so that would definitely make routing utilities like waste water tricky. And not sure how you’d have a heater; electric heat would decimate an electric system and there’s no liquid fuel to speak of.

Remember: it’s only worthwhile if it can get you home too. I guess if you’re doing on-grid only camping it would be fine, but I usually build for a feasible 3-day off grid.

> And not sure how you’d have a heater

Install a natural gas vessel. Heating, cooking and good for a generator too.

Fixed nat-gas containers or other nat-gas installation can be a PITA though. Here in Germany, anything permanently installed means you have to do extra checkups every two years.

Diesel heater, couple hundred bucks off eBay. They come with a tank, or build your own to suit the space.

Re heater, wouldn’t you use a heat pump? As a percentage of the energy needed to run a heavy van, heating the interior space with a heat pump would be pretty minimal.

The VW California has been a huge success for ages.

When they do an ID.Buzz California, it's going to be fully sold out for _years_. EV is the perfect platform for a camper van, you can get so much complexity out of the system by having electric everything.

> EV is the perfect platform for a camper van, you can get so much complexity out of the system by having electric everything.

Only if you're happy with being locked to camping lots and RV parks providing 230V outlets. Anyone willing to go off-road/wild camping however... when you're going far out of civilization (which is easy enough to do in Europe and even easier in the US), the last thing you need is your battery dying right when you can't afford it. For an ICE based camper, everyone I know just puts a jerry can or two in it which is almost always enough to get you to a gas station or to keep you supplied with fuel to keep warm over night, but that's not possible with an EV camper.

The smart choice is to have a separate generator to charge the batteries, maybe offset some of the electricity use with solar panels.

But it all depends on what you use the RV for. If you want to go to the Appalachians for weeks without human contact, go with the liquid fuel option and bring a lot of it with you. Maybe a small solar panel for electronics.

For a random camper like me with access to a pretty good EV charging network the lack of electricity won't be a problem. the ID.Buzz has a 77kWh battery that can easily run everything I need for multiple days without needing to charge.

Maybe they will get stolen like my Amazon packages :D

Why do people like home delivery? (or, does anyone, really?)

It is such a pain in the ass. I'd pay good money NOT to have it delivered to my home, but often enough you don't know about it when you order it.

Here most will pass several small postal-services (these are your closest gas station or small grocery store or ) on their way to/from work every single day. Even if I'm gonna be home I'd rather take the three minute walk than being interrupted when I'm in the shower or be worried that my short errand is going to make me miss my package.

It of course makes it worse that I live in an apartment, but it is not like a house would make it much better. The whole concept that we (well, the US at least) have porch pirates is just wild. Why?

Such unimaginable waste driving around to every single home needing delivery. Especially when it is such a damn hassle trying to reroute the package to your workplace if you even have that luxury.

If you are old/sick, fine. Or certain kinds of goods such as grocery deliveries. But for the love of god, why would anyone think it is desirable for it to be the norm? How can this even be a thing?

I like my home, I don't like other people or crowds.

I pay extra for home delivery so I can avoid people and crowds.

You wouldn't ever need to be in a crowd.

Avoid people, fine, but I don't think that would be the norm. A lot of places have boxes where you just enter a code. Wouldn't ever need to be closer than 20 meters to a living soul.

>You wouldn't ever need to be in a crowd.

Have you been inside of a grocery store in the week before Thanksgiving or Christmas?

The local one? It will be fine. The big one? No thanks but they are a little bit off anyway so postal services typically don't go there (and if so I'd just pick a different spot).

Oh good. Thank god that the stranger on the internet you’re responding to has access to the same exact options that you do.

Makes for better discussions not to assume a special case and also not the two busiest weeks of the year, don't you think?

You categorically stated that there is never any cause to be in a crowd. Makes for a better discussion when you don’t impose your lofty opinion as an absolute, don’t you think?

There is one in a corner shop nearby, but it's full 99% of the time. And if it's full the packages get rerouted to the big post office a few kms away - which is always packed full of people.

I'll still pay the few euros extra for a home delivery =)

If home delivery wasn't the default maybe there would be incentives to improve that.

By all means, pay for it. That is great, but it should cost money (rather than subsidized) because it is so wasteful, and it shouldn't be the default.

The world misses you. The world is better off knowing you and your opinions. Friction and conflict are not a bad thing.

> I'd pay good money NOT to have it delivered to my home

Wait, are you being forced to get home delivery? Or are you already paying good money to buy things at the markup of your local stores?

From a lot of (bad) places you don't know at the time of order whether it is going to be home delivery or not. Amazon is probably the worst in this regard but especially when ordering abroad they might use something like fedex or UPS (which both do have local services where you can pick packages up, but depending on what the sender opted to when they sent it might not be possible. "And because everyone likes home-delivery why not default at that").

Or like in the UPS case, oh, no, our store can only handle packages going by air. Boat packages are a completely different thing. There is no way we can help you because they have a different tracking label. The kinds of problems humans create for themselves...

> From a lot of (bad) places you don't know at the time of order whether it is going to be home delivery or not

What on earth are you talking about? Every purchase for a physical item I’ve made since 2001 included a billing address and a shipping address. How on earth are you being tricked? Do you just not look at shipping address and get mad later? That is a very particular problem.

I think what they are trying to say is that a lot of times you don't know (and don't have a choice) if you are going to have to go to a post office to pick up a package or if it will be delivered to the door. Sometimes it's up to the sender, sometimes it depends on the size and sometimes it up to the whim of the postal operator. I'd say only about 25% of my Amazon purchases here in Spain have the explicit option to go pick it up at a local shop or Amazon locker. The other 75% of the time I can have it only sent to my home address. Of those times, about 50% of the time they deliver to the door and the other 50% to some random shop nearby for me to pick up without any way of knowing which will be which. Obviously results will vary from country to country.

Edit: Nevermind.

FYI in the US, there is categorically never any confusion as to where a package is being shipped. Ever.

The question isn't where, but how.

> From a lot of (bad) places you don't know at the time of order whether it is going to be home delivery or not.

What does this sentence mean then?

Home delivery = delivery to door. Often requiring you to be there to sign the pickup or let someone in the apartment complex.

Not home delivery: Usually delivered to nearby gas station (or kiosk, grocery store, whatever) and/or post-box you can open with code. Where this is the norm it is usually a few minutes walking distance. But you can often pick where you want it, if you want it close to your work instead or wherever.

You have not answered my question at all. I know what home delivery is. I use it all the time!

How is it possible that you do not know whether a package will come to your house or (by your example) a nearby gas station kiosk?

Do you share an address with the nearby gas station kiosk?

How does not-home-delivery work then? If I send a package to your address, how will you get it? Automatically by home delivery?

When you send a package the only information provided is often the shipping address. If the service uses home-delivery that means that someone comes knocking on my door. If they don't provide home-delivery it will delivered to the nearest pickup-point and I'll get a note in my mailbox saying that there is a package to pick up (in reality I already know this because of tracking information via the web, app and/or sms+email if that was provided when the package was sent).

If the web site I'm ordering from provides it I can pick different options and depending on option I can pick which pickup point I prefer.

But what if they don't? What if I'm ordering something from a different country? What if the shipping provider they offer in that country don't operate in my country?

Even more common, it isn't even listed what provider they use for sending. They might probably use different providers depending on package size. If it is small it is going in my mailbox, if it is really big it can be too big even for my local gas station. So after ordering I get a tracking number and then I know which provider is gonna deliver it. And then I know if I have to WFH just to receive that package.

Last week I got a package that I had ordered from a large companies EU site. No idea even what country the package was going to be sent from. And I had no idea how it was gonna be delivered - free shipping though. A week after ordering I got an text message saying that amazon would send the package (f*ck, bad sign) and that it would arrive between 19 and 22 the very same day (someone even paid extra for evening delivery huh?). Well, I wasn't home that day so... Lucky for me they were overbooked and couldn't get to my place and by 23 they sent a message saying that they postponed it to the next day (at which point I happened to be home).

Or, what if they could just have dropped it off at the local pickup-point and I'd have it as soon as I got home? Not an option.

I am so confused here. Again, what on earth are you talking about?

You live in the US, right? If USPS, UPS, or Fedex is given a delivery address, that’s where they deliver the package. It’s that simple. There is no complicating factor whatsoever. They do not wander off to the local gas station and drop your package off there. That is a fantasy.

Different websites do not dictate the behavior of the shipping carrier, that’s also a fantasy. Once the seller hands the package to the shipping company, it is literally out of their hands.

In your story, a package on the way to your residence got delayed. This happens sometimes and has zero effect on the shipping address. There was no point in which you had to worry that maybe it would show up at a gas station.

Again, how is it possible that you do not know _WHERE_ your package is being sent to?

And if you live in an apartment and can't work from home? You let your $2000 package sit by the door? What if the package you have been waiting for three months happens to arrive during your one week vacation abroad? The package will wait for you by your door? Does sound simple yes...

No, I do not live in the US.

> "There was no point in which you had to worry that maybe it would show up at a gas station."

Why on earth would I be worried about that? That is what I wanted! So much easier and quicker. What I worry about is what would happen if I wasn't home during home-delivery.

I actually have a fedex package on its way from the US to me right now. Thankfully fedex are nowadays sane enough to allow me to redirect it to a gas station pickup point rather than trying to deliver it to me at home.

You still have not clarified this sentence:

> From a lot of (bad) places you don't know at the time of order whether it is going to be home delivery or not

What do you mean by that? I am not discussing what to do with expensive packages or the merits of dropoff locations. I literally just asked what you mean when you say you do not know if a package that’s shipped to your home will be delivered to your home.

Also, what did you mean by this if you don’t live in the US?

> The whole concept that we (well, the US at least) have porch pirates is just wild. Why?

> "What do you mean by that?"

First of all it was answered by gorbypark, but I also answered it many times. You don't seem to keen on answering questions though.

To make it real clear: You go to a website, put something in your cart. Enter your home address as shipping address. Add payment and complete the order.

Now the package might end up at a gas station, or it might be home-delivery. And there is no way to know that before you get your tracking information, at which point you can't even cancel the order without receiving it first.

> Also, what did you mean by this if you don’t live in the US?

Because youtube is full of videos of porch pirates in the US, and it is not anything I've really heard of where I live. But yes, that sentence was badly written. Did not mean we as in my country.

This is by far the dumbest exchange I’ve had on this website.

Have you considered advocating for a more functional mail system where you live rather than trying to convince people in other countries that the very concept of mail delivery is universally flawed?

Well, I consider the system in the US to be dystopian and much worse than what we have here.

The only problem we have is with home delivery and that is mostly been with US providers anyway. And it is explained partly because the US providers are mostly used by businesses, where "home" delivery actually make sense.

Wait, your delivery guys don't just drop your parcel and run these days? Since COVID even when I'm in the house are happy to answer the door it's rare I actually see who dropped the parcel.

I know, right? I can see them from my office window, sometimes I run down to get the package to say hi but they're already half in their car.

Home delivery for what, would be my question. I absolutely hate home delivery for food, and that went for pizza delivery in the "bad old days" just as much as Doordash in modern times. I'm only ever getting food from local restaurants anyway, I'd rather get it myself.

But package delivery, hell yeah. It's opened up an unimaginable world of products that simply don't exist at a corner store.

I live about a 5 minute walk from my local post office, but that's still an order of magnitude less convenient than having stuff delivered to my house. Especially because the post office is not necessarily on my way home from wherever I happen to be.

I've never once worried about missing a package. you seem to be constructing an idealized world of urban life, while simultaneously creating a fantastically unsafe world of suburban life. I've never in my life had a package stolen from my porch. I don't have security cameras up all over the place, I just choose not to worry, and it all works fine.

"... that simply don't exist at a corner store."

Which is why you have it delivered to your corner store...

"and it all works fine."

Why risk it if i it doesn't add anything. An insane amount of energy and effort for something that doesn't bring the slightest value. Don't focus too much about porch pirates, I haven't heard of them here at all so it is not part of my main argument. I just think it is wild that it exist at all (and evidently by youtube it can be a problem).

A magnitude less convenient is still barely just inconvenient.

> I'd pay good money NOT to have it delivered to my home

Amazon lets you deliver stuff to automated lockers in various high traffic places like what you mention.

Also some delivery services will let you specify a shop or something where you can have your package delivered instead of your home.

> Such unimaginable waste driving around to every single home needing delivery

Unless the deliveries are to high population density locations with a high density of pickup locations, home delivery the the most efficient way to shop in terms of resource usage. Anything that stops people getting in their car is a win.

"Unless the deliveries are to high population density locations with a high density of pickup locations, home delivery the the most efficient way to shop in terms of resource usage. Anything that stops people getting in their car is a win. "

The point was that you already pass such places on your way to work or other errands, car or not that is way more efficient both for climate and human resources than having dedicated drivers doing stops at every single home on their route.

Don't confuse this with going to the mall.

I would still argue that home delivery is more environmentally friendly...

The Amazon and UPS drivers delivering to my suburban neighborhood seem to drop at least two packages per street, so the cost in gas per delivery is half a street (wild approximation). If I am driving home and stop off at a grocery store as I pass I still have to get to and navigate in and out of their parking lot. Likely more than half a streets worth of gas in the best possible case.

Only walking to the store is going to be more environmentally friendly.

We can talk about Amazon's packaging related carbon costs but that is not this thread.

Even if that argument would hold (which seriously doubt)...

But, the completely unnecessary hundreds of thousands of trucks that saves people literally 5 minutes???

And the unimaginable number of man-years wasted on this?

Incomprehensible.

yeah seems like ubiquitous local delivery spots will be the future. It s a matter of efficiency

What, what? I honestly don't understand why you wouldn't want home delivery?? Things arrive at your home, you don't need to go anywhere, I work from home so I'm here almost all the time anyway, Amazon gives you accurate timing for delivery time so no, I won't be accidentally in the shower, and porch pirates don't really exist in the UK - if I'm not at home(or don't answer the door) then the parcel goes back to the depot and I get it delivered the following day.

But yes, like others have mentioned - you can just pick an automated locker as delivery address if that's what you prefer.

Honestly, I'm so incredibly baffled by your comment it's crazy.

Then you didn't read my comment as a said I would even pay for the feature not to have home delivery, if I had the option.

The thread gives more context. I am as baffled that home delivery is the default by many services.

Which model is better for minimising environmental impacts of all sorts:

1. 50 people all drive from their homes to various stores/pickup points to buy shit, or

2. 1 vehicle drives to 50 homes, dropping off the shit they ordered online.

First option isn't relevant to the discussion.

Fair enough, but a similar, albeit lesser impact, scenario holds if there's a localish (but not close enough to walk) dropoff point.

(anecdata: My closest dropoff point is a 40 minute drive each way.)

It does not, by a longshot. Because most people wander from their home at some point, regularly even. Pick a spot near a location that is close to where you will be going regardless (which for most people most of the time will be very close to their home anyway, since it is so convenient no matter where you are going).

That your closest dropoff is so far away is likely a result of it not being prioritized, due to perhaps home-delivery. Or that you live so far off the grid. Then of course you like home-delivery, but it is being heavily subsidized.

Neither is an argument for the default home-delivery I'm talking about.

> My closest dropoff point is a 40 minute drive each way.

Obviously it's different for you but I'd argue this is not the case for the majority of people. Also I'd say maybe we don't have to rush there as soon as the package arrives. Why not pick it up next time we're there anyway? Let's go one step further, why buy so much shit in the first place. It all comes down to the fact that we've taken on a lifestyle that's extremely convenient and luxurious but doesn't seem to be very sustainable.

In Canada we have something like this.. Flex Delivery. Let's you just enter the address of the nearest postal outlet to you. Boxes are left at that depot, you get a notification when it's ready for pickup.

Edit: since our gov't postal service is teamed up with a pharmacy/general store (Shoppers Drugmart), there's a tonne of convenient locations. Closest one to me is 4 blocks, on my drive home from work.

https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/personal/recei...

> Such unimaginable waste driving around to every single home needing delivery.

I think this is a very reasonable thing to say. It's such a decadent thing to get all your stuff delivered to your door especially given how much stuff many of us get these days. It's so inefficient compared to shipping to a central location (where possible) like a post office or a grocery store and picking it up next time you're there anywhere.

There's already the option to use delivery lockers if it's that inconvenient for you. In my area they just drop the package on my porch for 99.9% of deliveries so there's not even really a concern of missing or being interrupted by a delivery.

Also I'm still working from home over 75% of the time during the work week (1 week per month requested time in office) so I'm not actually driving by all these possible pickups constantly and it would be a net additional trip, and a short one at that which is the worst case for emissions and additional engine wear because it will barely get warmed up on the 1 mi drive to my nearest locker location, to use them.

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