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Jeff Bezos climate change plan unveiled – buy 100k electric vans.
- option 7y agothis is awesome and makes a lot of business sense (Amazon is an investor in Rivian). kudos to Amazon!
- zelias 7y agoThe shareholder proposal may have been defeated, but this is a sign to me that it _worked_ to bring this problem to the forefront of Amazon's agenda. This is a good thing.
- rasz 7y ago>delivery vans from vehicle manufacturer Rivian is Rivian really a vehicle manufacturer? or a startup? I though you have to actually manufacture something to be called manufacturer.
- new_realist 7y agoRivian is the best American EV maker out there.
- squegles 7y agoIs it? They are not even in the hands of consumers yet.
- IronWolve 7y agoThey already have their Truck and SUV on display at the motor shows, 0-60 in 3 seconds, towing 7700 lbs, 700hp, 400 mile range. They said shipping in 2020. But I dont see any mention of vans on their website. Amazon is a financial backer of Rivian, so this makes sense.
- driverdan 7y agoThey've been showing the truck for years. It's still vaporware. They've yet to build a single production vehicle.
- sidcool 7y agoThese will be mostly Rivian pick up trucks. Kinda smart move. $700 million investment will help Amazon.
- Arubis 7y agoI'm glad to see that there's deliberate movement in this direction. However, it's a little dismaying that the headline is implying that we can address climate change by Consuming More Stuff; that's how we got into this mess in the first place.
- tristanstcyr 7y agoWhy does this cause more stuff to be consumed?
- alttab 7y agoI think the implication is that it doesn't seem like the path taken by Bezos is to have people consume less, but to make deliveries more carbon neutral.
- tracer4201 7y agoI mean - less consumption is a topic even bigger than Amazon. The US economy has consumption as its very foundation. It’s not clear what we would turn to. Step 1 is to do what you’re doing now but in a more sustainable way. Remember, our current state is we are debating whether we even ought to make change in the first place. The larger shift to less consumption overall isn’t something we can achieve in 5 years. It’s more of a marathon that’ll take 20-30 years.
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- supertrope 7y agoReduce reuse recycle. It’s greenest and most efficient to eliminate unneeded consumption first. Then reuse through repair, buying used, hand me downs. Then comes investing in green machinery. Finally there’s recycling to recover raw materials.
- gambiting 7y agoI think it's because the environmental cost of making a brand new electric van has a higher environmental cost than just driving the van you already have until it dies. Basically the world would be better off if people stopped buying new vehicles tomorrow completely, and just drove whatever they have, no matter how polluting it is - it's still better on the planet than making a new one. Of course our economy doesn't work that way and it's a completely unworkable solution for now - so replacing ICE vans with electric ones is second best solution.
- gok 7y agoWow talk about win-win. Amazon gets electric vans and Rivian gets ~$10B in expected revenue, which increases the value of Amazon's stake in Rivian.
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- lazyjones 7y agoAlso, Amazon gets to pay fewer taxes due to accrual...
- throwaway5752 7y agoThis is a big deal because it increases the critical mass towards electrification of transportation, even moreso than the carbon offset by the vans. Right now early adopters are okay with ChargePoint and tolerating some uncertainty with the next charge, but we need 1) more renewable grid input and 2) much more "refueling" infrastructure (public 40 and 80 amp charging).
- giacaglia 7y agoAmazon clearly wants Rivian to succeed: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/15/rivian-announces-700-million-investment-round-led-by-amazon.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/15/rivian-announces-700-million... :-)
- throwaway5752 7y agoAnd that is fine, in my opinion. I don't think it's self dealing. If you think climate change is an urgent issue, you fund solutions. When you fund solutions, you choose the best option. When you're ready to act on it, you choose the best option.
- WhompingWindows 7y agoWell, it's not as if there are 100k electric vans ready for purchase, Rivian needs their investment and their orders to scale up to 100k. Amazon's creating its own demand and supply here.
- throwaway5752 7y agoYup. Just comes with the territory of the scale they are operating at. Looking at Renault Kangaroo ZE and Nissan e NV200 sales its possible 100k electrics vans is more than have ever been produced, cumulatively, period.
- pleatedwaffle 7y agoIs there any chance this will make Rivian Trucks cheaper? I really want one.
- notJim 7y agoThe company has been around for 10 years without shipping a product. To me the bigger question is whether you'll ever be able to buy one. By contrast, Tesla started in 2003 and shipped the Roadster in 2008 and the Model S in 2012.
- AgloeDreams 7y agoCounter point: They have major investment and signed contracts from real manufacturers like Ford (which is the real issue with starting an EV company, sure you can design an electric truck but can you build them?) The fact of the matter is that they now have the tech, solid R&Ded designs and the best people on earth to help them make them, this is not what any other company has ever had at EV manufacturing, not even Tesla.
- DanCarvajal 7y agoI'm rooting for Rivian, if they make a true small SUV after their initial R1S launch I'd be all over it.
- benologist 7y agoAWS profits something like a million dollars an hour so it's pretty unambitious to need 11 years to make AWS be fully green. $100+ billion in profit will accrue from AWS in that time. It doesn't take 11 years to claw back 1900 workers' health care.
- cryoshon 7y agowe can't "electric van" our way out of the climate crisis because it makes too little of a dent over too long of a timescale. bezos' plan is far too weak to even be worth media coverage. mediocre quarter-measure plans like this one will keep us moving at full steam towards catastrophe. if bezos wanted to put a dent in climate change genuinely, he'd take the path of least resistance: subsidize a meaty discount on goods that emit the least CO2 during their production and use as measured by a third party authority. this would create a virtuous economic cycle of manufacturers competing for lower emissions. instead, he's found a way to accomplish little other than self-enrichment while appearing to make an effort. well, bravo. bezos is well on the way to being the richest man on an uninhabitable rock of a planet.
- penneyd 7y agoHe also stated the goal is to be carbon neutral by 2040, that's a solid goal. So it goes beyond the vans.
- perfunctory 7y agoYet another plan. Great. When will we finally start seeing media reports on actual emission reductions? In 2020 I want to read "Amazon has reduced its total emissions by 5% compared to 2019".
- wongarsu 7y agoThe most upvoted comment on HN would be how this 5% reduction is just meaningless marketing, probably because Amazon will have increased sales by X%, meaning the products delivered maybe had a higher carbon footprint.
- codingdave 7y agoWhile I applaud any move towards decreasing negative impacts our our environment, I also encourage people to take advantage of Amazon's option to pick a delivery day and get all your stuff at once. Even without that option, Amazon has some work to do on their route planning - I should never need 3 different deliveries from 3 different drivers on the same day, and that has occurred at my house.
- mabbo 7y agoConsider this: shipping is free for you. Sending more trucks to deliver packages many times per day is annoying for you, but it's expensive for Amazon. That's a huge incentive to do that as rarely as possible.
- Kye 7y agoThose three trucks would be inefficient if they only delivered to you, but they could have saved trips by arranging it that way. I forget where I read it, but there was an explainer that showed how all those deliveries with one huge box for one tiny item saved gas and packaging on the scale of the entire delivery network. Logistics is weird.
- 0x262d 7y agoas expected, sections of the bourgeoisie are trying to barely solve CO2 pollution while continuing to maximize every other kind of resource consumption and concomitant non-CO2 pollution. or at least, pretend that they are trying to solve it. either way they will run into the concerted resistance of the bourgeoisie who depend on CO2 pollution as a business model, and who are extremely powerful. the alternative to this shitshow is to democratically plan resource investment, and get away from the insanity of a road-and-small-vehicle-based city system (aka, establish socialism). I'm optimistic we'll get there after the youth watch rich people vacillate over climate change for a few more years :)
- Fins 7y agoBecause every place that did implement socialism did SUCH a great job of preventing pollution and protecting nature! As they say, the only thing History teaches us is that History teaches us nothing.
- jason46 7y agoWhat about the strain on the environment from sourcing and disposing batteries for these vans?
- fooblitzky 7y agoHow can you meet Paris commitments early when you are working on helping oil & gas companies extract fossil fuels from the ground even faster? https://aws.amazon.com/oil-and-gas/ https://aws.amazon.com/oil-and-gas/
- adrianN 7y agoFor cities it would make sense to deliver packages to neighborhood hubs in vans and from there deliver them using cargo bikes to the recipients. That would probably safe more energy, but cost a bit more as a bicycle worker can transport fewer packages per day.
- m0zg 7y agoWhere I live UPS trucks have been plug-in hybrid for years now. They are powered entirely by battery when driving slowly through neighborhoods. So I'm not sure how much difference this would _really_ make.
- driverdan 7y ago> Bezos said the first electric delivery vans will be on the road by 2021 I strongly doubt this will happen. Their truck still isn't in production and they haven't even built a concept van yet. The chances of them producing vans in two years is very low.
- AgloeDreams 7y agoI thought this about a year ago when they came out of stealth, however; Rivian has all the magic in their sleeves. 1: They actually did the work, the prototype trucks are rather far in development for their announcement. Seemingly they are almost R&D-complete. This is different from most other EV startups like FF or Lucid as they pretty much just showed off mockups. 2, and this is what really matters: They got major investments from established ICE manufacturers (Huge investment from Ford) with agreements to cooperate on building the factory and making products together. This is the real barrier to entry on EV startups and they executed on it by spending years figuring out the powertrain issue and then going off and getting help by those with the institutional knowledge on manufacturing them. This is why I think they will win. 3: It's a van, a skateboard with a metal box on top, likely borrowing heavily from already developed designs. Note that the van appears largely production ready lacking all the normal concept drawing details and lacking any form of wild 'FUTURE!!' details. Boring Ford van mirrors, standard marker lights, correct size tires and rims. This is a production-ready design, not a concept-car, that likely makes use of the Ford production machine for all the little bits. Think of it like building an app with Angular or React, they know what they want to do and what they want to use other sources for.
- electriclove 7y agoI appreciate the optimism and hope you are right but there is plenty of talk/hype in this space and there are not many EVs that are not compliance cars actually in production in the US.