Amazon has been making an effort toward reducing the level of emissions from daily operations. They've currently set a goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2040. This would give them a 10 year lead on the Paris Agreement.
And what a better way to reduce emissions than with electric vehicles? Especially when you're primarily a delivery company. To make that happen, Amazon has committed to investing $700 million toward Rivian, an American electric vehicle startup company. This money will go toward 100,000 electric vans, which they hope to deploy as soon as 2021. Their goal is to have all 100,000 running by 2030. The company estimates that this will save about 4 million metric tons of carbon a year, once fully implemented.
"We’re done being in the middle of the herd on this issue—we’ve decided to use our size and scale to make a difference. If a company with as much physical infrastructure as Amazon—which delivers more than 10 billion items a year—can meet the Paris Agreement 10 years early, then any company can."
Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO and founder
Rivian, who is absolutely on board with this investment, also released an image of the van that Amazon will be getting. The startup has yet to produce a publicly available commercial van, so far. But if they do, it will most likely be a variant of this vehicle, seen in the header image.
We did some math, and these come out to about $7,000 per electric van. Now if only consumers could get an electric vehicle for that cheap.
