Amazon is bulking up its fleet of electric vehicles beyond the delivery vans that many customers are accustomed to seeing in their neighborhoods.
The company announced Tuesday that it has begun rolling out nearly 50 heavy-duty all-electric trucks in Southern California — its largest such fleet — to handle first- and middle-mile operations to help further decarbonize the tech giant’s delivery operations.
The trucks will haul cargo containers and customer packages, and are expected to travel more than 1 million miles each year with zero tailpipe emissions, Amazon said.
First-mile operations, or global logistics, is where goods move from where they are manufactured, through customs, across oceans, into ports, and then into Amazon’s fulfillment network. Amazon has electric trucks on the road at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, for use in transporting containers to an Amazon facility in Santa Fe Springs, Calif. The company expects to be using a dozen of the vehicles by the end of the year.
Middle-mile trucks move Amazon orders between fulfillment centers, sort centers, air facilities, and delivery stations, where packages are finally loaded into last-mile vans to be delivered to customers. Amazon has deployed 35 electric heavy-duty vehicles for such transportation in Southern California and installed more than 45 direct current fast chargers across 11 sites to power the trucks.
The battery-electric Class 8 Volvo VNR Electric trucks have a range of up to 275 miles and a gross combination weight of 82,000 pounds.
“Heavy-duty trucking is a particularly difficult area to decarbonize, which makes us all the more excited to have these vehicles on the road today,” said Udit Madan, vice president of Worldwide Amazon Operations, in a statement. “We’ll use what we learn from deploying these vehicles as we continue to identify and invest in solutions to reduce emissions in our transportation network, and to impact sustainability in the trucking industry more broadly.”
Amazon launched its custom electric delivery vans from Rivian in 2022, and has since scaled the use of those vehicles to more than 13,500 across the U.S.
The company has vowed to reach carbon neutrality by 2040 and urged others to do the same through the Climate Pledge. Beyond electric vehicles, Amazon is paying for wind and solar energy to help power its operations and is investing in climate tech startups. Amazon’s carbon emissions increased between 2019 and 2021, before dropping for the first time in 2022.
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