Deliveries are now being made with the electric vans in some US Cities
Amazon has ordered 100,000 of these vehicles
The delivery giant wants to have electric vans in over 100 US cities by the end of the year
Amazon and Rivian have been working together on an electric delivery van for some time now and the first units are beginning to be used for deliveries across the United States.
After initial testing by Amazon was completed, the Rivian vans have been dispatched to a number of large cities around the country, including Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, and Baltimore.
The retail giant wants to implement these new vehicles quickly since it aims to have them present in more than 100 cities by the end of the year.
During the rest of the decade, Rivian will deliver the rest of the vans that were part of the original order which will be sufficient to meet Amazon’s goal to have 100,000 electric delivery vehicles on the road by 2030.
This goal is likely to be quite pessimistic since Amazon has also ordered a number of the upcoming Ram Promaster EV that will be introduced in 2023, thus making its current number of electric delivery vans on order much higher than 100,000.
The gradual integration of the vans into Amazon’s fleet will also allow issues to be caught and fixed before they affect a very large number of vehicles and risk paralyzing the company’s operations.
One such issue that was apparently fixed since the beginning of the initial assessments is the effect of the heating and cooling system on the range, which apparently plummeted when drivers wanted to stay cool or warm.
News of its vans being put to work is an important milestone for Rivian since the young automaker has only begun producing vehicles a little less than a year ago.
The company has had trouble increasing its production rate in its first months of operation, but it now seems to have picked up enough to supply Amazon with enough vehicles for now.
This could also hint at improvements in the supply chain crisis, which could mean that Rivian’s other models could also begin to reach their customers more quickly.
