Amazon is continuing to test its Rivian-built electric delivery vans as it is now testing the custom-made EVs in San Francisco.
San Francisco is the second California city that the new Rivian delivery vans have been spotted out testing. The first was seen in the suburbs of Los Angles not long ago. San Francisco is the perfect place for Amazon to really put its Rivian vans to the test, using the city’s famously steep hills and fickle weather.
Last month, Amazon officially started making customer deliveries using the first Rivian electric vans in Los Angeles. The fact that the company is now expanding customer deliveries using the electric vans in the San Francisco area indicates that everything in LA went well. At least well enough for them to move forward in just a little over a month.
Amazon’s Rivian-built electric delivery vans are slated to begin customer deliveries across 16 cities in 2021. The electric vans themselves are built on Rivian’s skateboard platform and have a single charge range of 150 miles. According to Engadget, Amazon’s Rivian vans will feature different motor and battery configurations to accommodate different environments.
Amazon’s Rivian vans will begin running out of a delivery station in Richmond, California, just north of the San Fransisco. A station that is on a list of stations that Amazon is reconfiguring to service its electric fleet. In addition to reconfiguring, Amazon recently invested $200 million in a new delivery station smack dab in the center of San Francisco.
Rivian and Amazon’s relationship began to blossom in 2019 after Rivian took a $700 million round of funding led by company. Amazon announced about a year later that it would be purchasing 100,000 custom electric delivery vans from Rivian. A hefty order for the new California-based startup that really put it on the map.
The fact that Amazon’s Rivian vans are already hitting the asphalt in California bodes will with its goal of having 10,000 of the vans on the road by 2022. They hope to have all 100,000 vans on the road by 2030.
The Rivian-built Amazon vans are only a small piece in the big puzzle of Amazon’s $2 billion Climate Pledge Fund, that it announced last year. Amazon and several other companies who have already signed The Climate Pledge aim to be net zero by 2040, putting them ten years ahead of the Paris Agreement target.