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Rivian and Amazon’s Electric Delivery Van Is a Big Box With a Seriously Clever Design
Rivian and Amazon’s Electric Delivery Van Is a Big Box With a Seriously Clever Design-November 2024
2024-02-19 EST 22:12:01

A Rivian Amazon Electric Delivery Van is parked on a neighborhood street.

Now, on the surface of things, cargo vans and delivery vehicles aren’t that interesting. They’re big boxes designed to be cheap to run, reliable and capacious, but that’s where things stop. That’s not the case for the , though, because, with Amazon, efficiency is king (except when they ship tiny things in huge boxes, seriously, WTF?).

To nail down a final spec for the EDV, spent a ton of time with package delivery drivers as well as combing through data to determine which features and specifications the ideal Amazon van would need. Of course, whenever someone talks about vehicle features, ears tingle, so here’s his overview of the Amazon Rivian EDV.

All of the design decisions made here are fascinating, like the decision to put the extra window over the driver’s door to make the door openings symmetrical for future right-hand drive variants or the choice of going with two steps rather than three on the right-side door because drivers never used the third one in testing.

We love this kind of engineering and design work because it forces vehicle designers to get creative and work really hard to improve the experience of a vehicle without solely relying on electric gadgets and gizmos. It’s the same reason we love , for example.

The only real bummers about this whole EDV thing are that A: we’ll likely never get to drive one, and B: Amazon is . The second one is way more of a bummer than the first one.

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