Goodbye from Amazon to the delivery robot; centers its investment in electric mobility with 1,000 million

It aims to reach 10,000 vans and 1,500 heavy trucks powered by electricity by 2025It eliminates jobs in its autonomous citizen delivery robot called Scout and dissolves its work groupsAnnounces instead that some users will already begin to receive packages through drones in the US at the end of the yearFeet to the ground. This is what is happening in the e-commerce giant after the departure of Jeff Bezos as CEO of Amazon.com Inc. last July and the entry of Andy Jassy in his place. The visionary who started his business as a small online store has now taken his dreams to the sky, focusing on the space race with his activity at Blue Origin. But Bezos has left the fate of the distributor in the hands of an executive who is showing himself as a true “finisher”, in the best business sense of the word. Something that did not seem very difficult to intuit knowing that Jassy was in 2021 the second richest person on the planet according to the Forbes list, with a heritage of 177,000 million euros. Setting the general framework, Amazon’s trend over the years has been to undo unsatisfactory activities at the income level. For example, its attempt to break into mobile phone sales (in 2014), the “Echo Look” clothing styling camera and app that showed you dressed in various catalogs (in 2017), or the creation of a home scanner to the control and request for the purchase of food (June 2021, almost at the same time as Jassy’s arrival). Prime Air equipment, as well as other difficulties of various kinds. But the company published information last August with an explanatory video of its latest activities stating that “at the end of this year, users of Lockeford in California and College Station in Texas they would be among the first to receive drone deliveries” from his company. Information that “resurrected” Prime Air, which has been running since 2013 and whose goal is “the development of fully electric drones that deliver packages of less than 2.25 kilos to customers in less than an hour.” In that publication it is possible to see a test drone flying with a package and dropping it from a considerable height. So much luck. Work on its creation has stopped after three years of activity, according to various sources, including Bloomberg. In this case, the work teams made up of some 400 components are also being dissolved, according to company spokeswoman Alisa Carroll. “During our field tests, we worked to make Scout a unique casting experience. However, we have learned through customer feedback that there were aspects of the program that did not meet their needs. For this reason, we are finalizing these tests and reorienting the program”. From the traditional logistics world, this has been interpreted as a rejection by the user of a type of delivery that is not convincing. Meanwhile, from Amazon it has been indicated that a group of workers will continue to consider the idea of ​​an autonomous robot. announces an ambitious electrification plan for its transport fleet in our continent. With the intention of reaching 10,000 electric vans in 2025, the company has announced an investment of 1,000 million euros in Europe over the next five years. But not only that, since it intends to reach 1,500 electric heavy trucks -known as eHGV- in that same time horizon.Amazon already has some 3,000 electric vans delivering packages in the Old Continent. It also has five heavy trucks powered by electricity, the latter in the United Kingdom, and plans to put 20 more on the road in Germany before the end of 2022. But in electric mobility, the recharging network is almost as important as having the vehicles, as it is being revealed worldwide. That is why this investment aims to “promote innovation throughout the industry, and promote greater public infrastructure for recharging electric vehicles, helping the transport industry to reduce emissions more quickly.” It wants to create an ultra-fast charging network for its 1,500 trucksDavid ParryCharges in 2 hoursFor this reason, and to be able to move its electric trucks, Amazon is going to build hundreds of “specialized” fast chargers in its European facilities, which will allow it to charge the vehicles “in approximately two hours”. The recharging time is an ambitious figure, since it assumes that they must be ultra-fast chargers of at least more than 250 kW. The most advanced electric cars whose electrical systems support loads with this power, usually carry out 80% of the total battery charge in about 20 minutes. Jassy, ​​the company’s general manager, is clear about this investment. “Our transport network is one of the areas that poses the greatest challenges when it comes to decarbonising our activity. To reach net zero carbon emissions, substantial and sustained investment will be required. The implementation of thousands of electric vans, long-distance trucks and bicycles will help us move even further away from traditional fossil fuels and hopefully encourage the automotive and transportation industries in Europe and around the world to continue to scale and innovate. , since we will have to work together to achieve our climate objectives”. The company has just exceeded 1.5 GW of renewable capacity in Spain with the announcement a few weeks ago of two new projects in our country: a new wind farm in Aragón, of 36.96 MW of capacity, and a solar farm in Castilla y León, of 28.6 MW. With them, it already has sixteen projects of this type, thirteen solar farms and three wind farms, which when fully operational will generate energy equivalent to the consumption of 850,000 Spanish homes.