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.
- 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.
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.