His giant e-commerce it has ceased to be just that for years. It expands into various fields and the attentive reader can identify an industry that has been investing heavily for some time: autonomous driving. The big bet of the car is where Amazon throws its money and the latest news wants it to gain a significant share in a promising startup with robotic trucks.
The e-commerce giant intends to buy a 20% stake in Plus.ai, further strengthening its position in the emerging market. Alongside the company with its robotic taxis and experiments with sidewalk transport drones, Amazon recently ordered 1,000 autonomous trucks from Plus.ai, a startup California-based autonomous driving.
According to the Bloomberg revelation, Amazon is seriously considering acquiring 20% of the startup, a move that is expected to have serious consequences on how the giant transports its products to the planet. Only the acquisition of a share of Plus.ai is just the tip of the iceberg of Amazon’s involvement with autonomous driving technologies…
The agreement that puts it at the heart of autonomous driving
So, as Bloomberg reveals, Amazon is seriously considering buying 20% of Plus, which also announced its intention to go public.
The company intends to merge with Hennessy Capital Investment Corp V, an investment firm that is involved in several electric startups.
Plus is expected to receive $ 500 million from Amazon, in a deal that will send its value in excess of $ 3 billion. Plus has American and Chinese funds at its heart and has managed to raise another $ 150 million in a recent round of funding.
The Chinese transport company SF Holding Co already uses trucks with the autonomous driving technology of Plus (PlusDrive), which can cover 1,500 kilometers per day. According to an announcement by Plus, the state-owned China FAW Group intends to put its autonomous trucks into mass production.
It was founded in 2016 by a group of old Stanford students and has as its main sponsors many big and well-known names in the field. As for its collaborations, they reach as far as Europe, through the truck manufacturer Iveco SpA.
Amazon, one of the world’s largest companies in terms of capitalization, has been obsessed with robotic trucks for years.
The giant from Seattle began to transport batches of his products with the big and fully autonomous trucks of Embark since 2019. And while autonomous vehicles have so far failed to live up to the original aspirations of humanity, many continue to insist that technology is the future of transportation.
If the deal with Plus succeeds, it will be just the latest example of how much Amazon is betting on autonomous vehicles. In addition to investing in Embark and Plus, the internet giant has given another $ 500 million to Aurora, the autonomous driving startup founded and run by the former head of its autonomous driving department Google.
Amazon has also invested heavily in Rivian, the startup that develops electric vans for the giant.
And finally, just last year Amazon bought Zoox, another startup that makes its own standalone vehicle for transportation services.
Amazon and robotic deliveries
Amazon has been passionate about the autonomous delivery of its products for several years. January 2019 was a great moment, when the Scout distributor robot was released.
The six-wheeled vehicle timidly began delivering packages to some neighborhoods in Washington, DC, before arriving in California, Georgia and Tennessee.
Even today, it is not clear exactly how many such robots are on the streets, serving real customers.
The standalone delivery program is expanding slowly and steadily, as Amazon obviously does not want to lose the reputation it has built step by step for its fast and reliable deliveries.
She tells us that there are “a small number of Amazon Scout devices” serving two areas in Georgia and Tennessee, delivering parcels “between Monday and Friday, during business hours.”
The robots work completely autonomously, but are always accompanied by a human factor (Amazon Scout Ambassador, as it is called in the “language” of Amazon).
Amazon is not the only company that has started fully autonomous deliveries of its products, so do Walmart in Houston, using Nuro delivery robots.
With the coronavirus pandemic, the interest in autonomous technologies has revived and now many are trying to limit the human factor from the supply of goods.
Amazon even claims that Scout contributed to the pandemic, helping it to “meet growing consumer demand by complementing our transport network.”
Amazon and self-propelled trucks
Amazon is shipping its goods in self-propelled trucks developed by Embark, the US network CNBC revealed in early 2019.
In fact, photos of the trucks with the two logos (Embark and Amazon Prime) had found their way to social media, adding fuel to the fire of competition.
Embark does not build trucks, takes Peterbilt vehicles and incorporates autonomous driving technology. Her trucks move autonomously, but they also have a person inside.
Embark is not alone here, although it is a pioneer. It competes with some promising startups, such as Ike, Thor Trucks and Pronto.ai, but also the big players in the industry, Alphabet Waymo and Tesla of course.
Characteristic here is the silent fish. CNBC asked both companies about the form of their cooperation, but both declined to comment.
“Embark carries cargo for a number of large companies, but we can not discuss one company in particular, as our relationship is confidential,” said Embark CEO Alex Rodrigues.
Embark was founded in 2016 and raised $ 47 million in investment from the start.
The other investments in the industry
Equally important was Amazon’s investment in the stand-alone technology of Aurora Innovation, a startup founded by former executives of Google and Tesla and secured billions of dollars.
Amazon was its biggest investor in 2019, as another sign of the crazy amounts that the e-commerce giant is investing in autonomous driving. But also in the automotive industry in general.
Amazon already offers some car cabin services that work with the system Alexa. Some models even come with a built-in Amazon digital assistant. It even has a separate service that delivers its products to the. Trunk of its customers.
Amazon’s autonomous dreams have been articulated for years, but the investment in Aurora was the first time the giant has been explicitly linked to an autonomous driving company. Neither company told us what percentage of that $ 530 million in initial funding came from Amazon.
“Amazon’s unique expertise, capabilities and prospects will be invaluable to us as we work on our mission.” Aurora had just said about the investment.
Aurora was founded in 2016 by Chris Urmson, when he left the helm of Google Autonomous Driver. He left just a few months before the program was transformed into Waumo.
Urmson immediately recruited Sterling Anderson, head of Tesla (Autopilot)’s autonomous driving program, and his colleague in the autonomy department Uber, Drew Bagnell. Anderson and Urmson were eventually sued by Tesla for stealing its potential, but the matter was settled out of court.
Aurora has been working in the background for so long. What it has built is a “nervous system” for motorhomes to work with manufacturers to integrate its software into their models.
And indeed its first two customers in 2018 were Volkswagen and Hyundai.
In all, Amazon also operates a series of electric vans, signed by Rivian. By 2022, more than 10,000 Rivian electric vans will be on the streets on behalf of Amazon, and the question that arises now is whether they will also have autonomous driving technology.
The Rivian innovative vehicles They also have their own advanced “smart” guidance and assistance systems. Amazon’s Rivian van fleet is expected to exceed 100,000 vehicles by 2030.
Again, neither Amazon nor Rivian ever revealed the technical specifications of the vehicles! Rivian has been researching electric drive and autonomous driving since 2009, despite the fact that its first vehicles (the rural R1T and the SUV R1S) were released in November 2018.
With Amazon funding, Rivian has raised a whopping $ 700 million (February 2019). In April 2019, Ford entered the game, giving it another $ 500 million for a new electric vehicle with its logo.
Another 350 million was raised by Cox Automotive, while in July 2020 came the incredible funding cycle (again with the involvement of Amazon) which gave her $ 2.5 billion!
As for Amazon, has announced that by 2040 will have become a company with a “climate neutral” carbon footprint…
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