Everyone in the Democratic Media Complex wants us to know that electric vans are THE FUTURE of delivery. That remains to be seen, but they sure seem to have a lot of trouble being the present of delivery.
In the fall, Jeff Bezos tweeted praise for Rivian, a start-up under contract to make 100,000 electric delivery vans for Amazon, and its founder, R.J. Scaringe, calling him “one of the greatest entrepreneurs I’ve ever met.”
Then, Mr. Bezos worked in a jab: “Now, RJ, where are our vans?!”
The comment may have been in jest, but the problem he raised is a serious one.
Amazon has an insatiable appetite for electric vans, thanks to a ballooning logistics operation and a pledge that half of its deliveries will be carbon-neutral by 2030. But that hunger is running into the reality that the auto industry barely produces any of the vehicles yet.
While consumer electric cars are finally hitting their stride — Tesla delivered almost a million cars last year — the market for commercial electric vehicles is still nascent, with their heavier loads multiplying the technology challenges. Amazon would not say if Rivian delivered the first 10 production vans in December, as was expected, and other automakers are not manufacturing at scale yet, either.
Even though Amazon owns nearly 20 percent of Rivian, it has also put in orders with other automakers, to lay claim to as many vans as it can before they are even under production.
This month Amazon said it would buy “thousands” of electric Ram vans from Stellantis, the company formed last year after the merger of Fiat Chrysler and the French automaker Peugeot.
I too stumbled over “Stellantis” the first time I saw it, a company formed from the merger of three car companies, none of whose quality screamed “reliable.” (Or, indeed, even whispered it.) But I digress.
It has also ordered 1,800 electric vans from Daimler in Europe. And it has formed a partnership with Mahindra, the Indian automaker, as part of its goal to have 10,000 electric three-wheeled vehicles on the road by 2025.
“The scale and speed at which we’re trying to do this requires a lot of invention, testing and learning, and a completely new playbook,” Ross Rachey, who oversees Amazon’s global fleet, said in a statement.
Amazon expected to have roughly 175,000 of its vans on the road by the end of 2021, according to an internal document from late 2020, nearly all of which burned fossil fuels.
That number is growing quickly. Amazon is several years — and tens of billions of dollars — into a huge push to deliver packages, shifting away from relying on large carriers like UPS. To begin the expansion, Amazon ordered 20,000 diesel Sprinter vans from Mercedes-Benz.
You saw very few of those Mercedes vans on the road before Amazon started buying them, but now they’re everywhere. But, again: gas-powered.
Through its network of contractors, Amazon now delivers more than half of its orders globally, and far more in the United States. Amazon has six times as many delivery depots now as it did in 2017, with at least 50 percent more new facilities set to open this year, according to data from MWPVL, a logistics consultancy.
That logistics boom, accelerated by the pandemic’s shift to online shopping, multiplies the challenges the company faces in meeting its pledge to reduce its climate impact. Its vow to make half of its deliveries carbon-neutral by 2030 is part of the company’s broader pledge to be net-carbon-neutral by 2040.
Conveniently far in the future that deadlines can slip long after the people making such promises are retired.
“Electrification of their delivery fleet is a really important part of that strategy,” said Anne Goodchild, who leads the University of Washington’s work on supply chain, logistics and freight transportation.
Delivery vans are well suited to electric propulsion because they usually travel 100 miles or under in a day, which means they don’t need large battery packs that add to the cost of electric cars. Delivery trucks are often used during the day and can be recharged overnight, and usually require less maintenance than gasoline trucks. Electric vehicles don’t have transmissions and certain other mechanical components that wear out quickly in the heavy stop-and-go typical in delivery routes.
This isn’t strictly true. Some electric vehicles have two-speed transmission, and they still need gears to change drive-speed ratio.
In September 2019, when Mr. Bezos announced Amazon’s huge Rivian order — the largest ever order of electric vehicles — he positioned it as central to Amazon’s commitment to reduce its carbon footprint. At the time, he said he expected the 100,000 vans to be on the road “by 2024.”
Amazon invested at least $1.3 billion in Rivian, which Amazon says is supposed to make 10,000 vans as early as this year. Amazon also locked up exclusive rights to Rivian’s commercial vans for four years, with the right of first refusal for two years after that. The companies have been testing the vans for almost a year.
In regulatory disclosures in November, Rivian said it would make the full delivery to Amazon “by 2025.” Last week, Mr. Rachey said Amazon expected to have the vehicles on the road “no later than 2030.”
Rivian declined to comment.
Yeah, I bet.
There’s nothing impossible about making an all-electric fleet. With enough money (and assuming certain Biden-era supply chain disruptions don’t get worse), it could be done by the end of next year. But whether it could be done cost-effectively is another question. Battery capacity is constantly improving, but not by Moore’s Law-esque leaps and bounds. Lots more can go wrong on a gasoline-powered car, but the technology is mature and many individual engine parts are relatively affordable. By contrast, as the man who blew up his Tesla showed, replacing current lithium ion batteries for an entire car is hideously expensive right now. That will probably come down, but no one knows by how much or how quickly. There’s a case to be made that those batteries are so expensive that electric cars are actually worse for the environment than modern gas-powered automobiles. But pointing that out commits heresy against The Holy Global Warming Narrative.
By the way, it’s not just Amazon that’s having trouble. The Postal Service is finding electric vehicles a lot more expensive than they expected.
After the USPS was criticized on Capitol Hill for its $9.3 billion plan to replace 165,000 trucks—specifically because 90 percent of them would be powered by gas combustion engines—the government-operated service went back and crunched the numbers again. In its recently released Final Environmental Impact Statement, the USPS estimates that the cost of an all-electric fleet would be $11.6B. That’s an additional $3.3B.
If that price tag seems a bit steep, the USPS estimates that it could electrify 75,000 of its vehicles—less than half of the proposed total—for an additional $2.3B ($10.3B total). Still too high? That figure is a mere fraction of the financial losses the USPS has experienced in the last 15 years. According to a report published by the Government Accountability Office in September 2021, the USPS has lost more than $87 billion since 2007 as the volume of mail it delivers has dropped.
A billion here, a billion, and pretty soon you’re talking real money…
Tags: Amazon, electric cars, Energy Policy, Global Warming, Mahindra, Mercedes-Benz, Rivian, Stellantis, van
“Carbon neutral” is a fairy tale.
What powers the machinery used to extract the rare earth minerals used in the batteries in these allegedly “carbon neutral” vehicles?
What will power all the vehicles and equipment used to clean up the toxic mess left behind by the refinement and eventual disposal of all that lithium and all the other chemicals used to make those batteries?
What powers the ships and planes used to transport all the raw materials from all over the world that go into the production of these allegedly “carbon neutral” vehicles?
What powers the generation plants that produce the electricity required to power these allegedly “carbon-neutral” vehicles?
For the most part, it’s all fossil fuels.
The entire electric vehicle industry is a taxpayer-subsidized scam that creates more pollution problems than it solves. Seen those pictures of the day-glow Chinese rivers downstream from their rare earth mines? Disgraceful. Oh yeah, and most of those minerals come from unsavory sources like CCP front companies and African mines that pay children pennies while poisoning them with heavy metals.
But electric cars make dopey, upper-middle class white people and duped tech bros to feel smug and superior, so they get good press.
Elon Musk is a disgraceful con man and he’s going to sail into the sunset with billions of dollars, leaving a massive superfund site behind once all those batteries have to be disposed of. The whole thing is a farce. Another massive, destructive boondoggle brought to you by your tax dollars.
Props for the TMBG riff in the headline, though.
Always appreciate a good TMBG reference
People that blame Elon Musk instead of the Progressives that created this electric vehicle subsidy SACAM are the ONLY ones responsible.
Govt makes the rules yet the idiot Progressive Commie/Fascists blame the players.
“Elon Musk is a disgraceful con man and he’s going to sail into the sunset with billions of dollars…”
Elon Musk has never hidden what he’s on about: moving to Mars.
Everything he’s done points to that. And the fact that credulous idiots believe that it’s possible to go “carbon-neutral” with EVs–let alone “save the planet” from “global warming”–is hardly his fault. Those who buy these things are–as you point out–self-deluded imbeciles.
Suggestion: read the Robert Heinlein short story, “The Man Who Sold The Moon” and ask yourself–as I do–if there aren’t eerie similarities between Elon Musk and Delos D. Harriman.
For my money, Musk is the D.D. Harriman of our time. And that’s a GOOD thing.
^^^^
Yes, no one ever mentions exactly where all this electricity is coming from. The whole process is certainly not carbon neutral. Like in CA, no one counts the emissions of the pumps in Saudi Arabia or the tankers that bring us our oil because we are too precious to pump it ourselves here.
Bezos must be getting a government (taxpayer) subsidy for these vehicles.
So the USPS wants to spend $140,000 per van
“Everyone in the Democratic Media Complex wants us to know….”
I think you mean “Democrat Media Complex.” There is a vast difference between Democrat and Democratic.
It’s a current draw, but they’ll make it law, Electric Van
Delivery trucks (and to a lesser extent, over the road trucks) are almost the antithesis of pure electric drive. They are *heavy* and therefore take immense power to start and stop, as well as the problem with them being on the road for a full eight hours or more. There hasn’t even been a good inroad into the hybrid market for large trucks, and that’s a far more practical application. (Hybrids handle stop and go traffic for long periods quite well)
If the Post Office switches to an entirely electric fleet, they’re going to have immense issues with range as letter carriers just don’t have enough juice to get their van back to the office. A plug-in hybrid would make far more sense, like a plug-in Prius van done on a European layout so the driver’s wheel is on the right.
Perfect followup lyric, Spooky!
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Making all the batteries is raising serious issues, namely:
There is no environmentally sourced lithium.
There is no ethically sourced cobalt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dnN82DsQ2k
Some say the headline is a TMBG riff; I thought it was a parody of The Who’s Magic Bus.
I pretty much agree with No One of Consequence’s comment. Thanks for summing it up.
A couple of days ago I heard a gasoline motor running outside my house. It was a gas-powered generator on board a UPS van. The hybrid had run out of electricity and was using the inefficient generator to charge the battery. It took about 30 minutes.
Elon Musk is okay.
Musk got a loan from the government but he paid it all back long ago.
His car buyers got a subsidy for a while but that’s run out years ago.
His cars make $10 to 20 k profit per car.
Nobody else seems to be able to make EVs for a profit.
Patricia, California is among the USA’s top ten oil producing states.