zzdcar
Home
/
Reviews
/
Trucks
/
Here Are All Of The Design Secrets That Make Rivian's Electric Amazon Van Great At Delivering Packages
Here Are All Of The Design Secrets That Make Rivian's Electric Amazon Van Great At Delivering Packages-November 2024
2024-02-19 EST 22:13:04

Image for article titled Here Are All Of The Design Secrets That Make Rivian's Electric Amazon Van Great At Delivering Packages

Amazon will ship, on average, just over 1.6 million packages today. And tomorrow. And every day after that. Amazon delivers so many packages per day that it basically had to invent a new package delivery vehicle to save itself time and money. Working with electric truck company Rivian, Amazon developed its own vehicle from scratch to help its drivers get through the day.

The new Amazon-branded vans are absolutely unmistakable, and that works in Amazon’s favor. While you might be able to ignore a Prime-liveried Ram Promaster, the Rivian is distinctly its own vehicle. When you see one of these, and you almost certainly have or soon will, you won’t be able to see anything but Amazon. Amazon made sure of that. Amazon has already ordered 100,000 of these from Rivian.

Something I didn’t know before this video from Marques Brownlee, is that Amazon has ordered these vans in two different sizes. I’ve seen a few of them, and thought the size difference was just a trick of the eye. They’re both based on the same front-wheel drive architecture, and both carry the same size battery for about 150 miles of range (which is more than plenty for the miles a delivery driver needs to run in a day).

Image for article titled Here Are All Of The Design Secrets That Make Rivian's Electric Amazon Van Great At Delivering Packages

The driver cockpit area is slick and designed with ease of use in mind. While most of the controls, in typical Rivian fashion, have moved into a touch screen, there is still a button for the emergency flasher. Drivers use that button quite often, and needed it to remain a physical button. The cockpit is huge, with giant forward visibility and easy-to-use mirrors.

The driver door is a traditional swing-open door, but the sidewalk side door is a slider pocket door to aid driver ingress and egress, and avoid smashing into pedestrians. My favorite door, however, is the rear roll-up door, which has been optimized to prevent driver fatigue. Instead of having to yank up a heavy rolling door, the Amazon van’s door can self-retract at the push of a button. You still have to pull the door down yourself, but then you have gravity on your side.

Amazon loading and shipping facilities have big charging docks for these machines to overnight charge en masse. They’re going to be sucking down some serious electrons when there are forty or fifty of these things in for the night. The good thing is, most drivers will use less than 33% of the Rivian’s range, so anxiety over making it to the end of the day should never really be a problem.

This is a slick machine inside and out. It’s .

Comments
Welcome to zzdcar comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
Trucks
The 2025 Ram 1500 Ramcharger Is The Hybrid Truck America Probably Needs
The 2025 Ram 1500 Ramcharger Is The Hybrid Truck America Probably Needs
In addition to the all-electric , the truck brand announced this week that it will also release a engine gasoline-powered hybrid version of its electric pickup, called Ramcharger. The goal here is to use the V6 engine as a generator for the electric powertrain when the 92 kWh battery...
Nov 7, 2024
The Nissan Navara Was The Overdue Frontier We Deserved A Decade Ago
The Nissan Navara Was The Overdue Frontier We Deserved A Decade Ago
gets dunked on for letting models like the languish for years. But, the truck saw a model update well before the release of the , which is mechanically much like an with a design. Outside of the U.S., the successor to the second-generation Frontier came in 2014 with the...
Nov 7, 2024
Deer Flies Directly Into Pickup As Its Prospective Buyer Arrives
Deer Flies Directly Into Pickup As Its Prospective Buyer Arrives
No square inch of the Northeast is safe from deer, as video out of New Jersey shows. A deer, tearing through the suburbs, managed to leap over a Pontiac Vibe and Honda CR-V before landing on the bedside of a 2007 Chevy Silverado — just as a prospective buyer arrived...
Nov 7, 2024
Ford Robbed Us Of The Old Four-Door Ranger To Give Us The Explorer Sport Trac
Ford Robbed Us Of The Old Four-Door Ranger To Give Us The Explorer Sport Trac
By definition, a big truck like a or struggles to be small. Even in its smallest, most trucky configuration — a two-door single cab — a full-size truck is relatively large and comes with a sizable bed for hauling cargo. But a small truck like the third-generation can do...
Nov 7, 2024
There Was Once A Glorious Compact Chevy ZR2 Truck
There Was Once A Glorious Compact Chevy ZR2 Truck
Those who saw the meteoric rise of through the 2010s and onward probably associate the badge with the . The was Chevy’s halo midsize truck when it was released in 2016, but the ZR2 badging goes all the way to the when Chevy made the S-10 ZR2. It’s gnarly....
Nov 7, 2024
Porsche Built A 911 With Portal Axles To Go Where Unimogs Can't Reach
Porsche Built A 911 With Portal Axles To Go Where Unimogs Can't Reach
No car has ever driven at higher altitude than this 992-generation Porsche 911 Carrera 4S with portal axles. On Saturday the Porsche crew, led by racing driver Romain Dumas, reached the highest peak of the west ridge of the Ojos del Salado volcano in Chile, . That’s the tallest...
Nov 7, 2024
Copyright 2023-2024 - www.zzdcar.com All Rights Reserved