(GPS beeping)
- We got a regular Tuesday morning
but we got a little added fun
we're going to the vehicle lab today
so it's a good day.
- [News Reporter] United Nations report
on climate change is out and it is grim.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC
once again makes clear that
the world needs to act now to save the planet
from the worst effects of global warming
emissions of all kinds.
- It's somewhat disheartening
but I think the main takeaway for me is it's on us
no one else is gonna magically make this happen.
And so we have a role at a large corporation.
We can't wait.
We need to solve it
irrespective of what's happening around us.
(bright music)
- [News Reporter] Amazon just announced The Climate Pledge
a new campaign to combat the climate crisis.
- [News Reporter] Jeff Bezos revealed yesterday
a plan to make Amazon carbon neutral by 2040.
- We essentially went to every major auto manufacturer
in the world and said
"This is what we need on an electric delivery vehicle."
And we got a lot of answers about why that wasn't possible.
- [News Reporter] Amazon has ordered
100,000 electric delivery vans
from U.S. based auto manufacturer, Rivian.
- You're asking an entire industry
to sort of shift what they make, how they do product design
who they employ, like on every level, on the vehicle level
on the infrastructure, organizationally, culturally
like all of that needs to shift.
- Rivian was one of the earliest signers
of The Climate Pledge.
Our goal is to put thousands of electric delivery vans
on the road, starting in 2022
putting at least a hundred thousand on the road by 2030.
When was the last time you saw the van?
- It's probably been a year now.
You're doing some user studies with packages and boxes
where you could take things off, so this is really great.
There's no playbook for any of this.
Nobody has electrified a fleet of delivery vans at this scale.
(train horn blaring)
- [Anne] We haven't honestly done that much
in the supply chain space.
I think there's a huge opportunity
to reduce CO2 emissions from goods transport.
So as a percentage
30% of CO2 emissions from transportation
30% of that is from the supply chain
30% of that is the Last Mile.
- At Amazon, Last Mile is taking a package
from our last physical delivery stations
and transporting the packages to the customer.
(bright music)
In 2018, I started leading
our global Last Mile vehicle fleet
and we had no electric vehicles.
Bringing a van from sketch to full scale production
in two to three years is a pretty crazy challenge
and a lot of people thought Amazon and Rivian were nuts
for signing up for it.
When we're operating these electric delivery vans at scale
we'll be preventing millions of metric tons per year
of carbon emissions.
- This is our way of removing that CO2
from getting into the environment
into the neighborhoods, into the atmosphere
and electrification is the way we're gonna do it.
- The beauty of gas vehicles
is that infrastructure's been around for a century.
For us, the challenge has been
bringing up the entire ecosystem.
We have to take hundreds of physical locations
and make them electric ready.
- When we started this journey
there really wasn't a product for fleets
from a charging standpoint.
- So I lead the design team
our design team works on site designs.
We figured out how to get chargers electrified.
Imagine you go into any parking lot you can imagine today
figure out how to get chargers deployed
in that parking lot
with absolutely no existing infrastructure.
So there's probably not a utility
there's probably not a power line
and there's no chargers.
- Is the cable here, is there any difference between
what we put below ground and above ground?
- What we're doing above ground today
you're using more of this wires.
- The challenge we're dealing with
is there are very few places
that have put in the number of chargers
that we're putting in.
When you talk about 3,000 vehicles or 5,000 vehicle
that's a big number and that would be a big fleet.
But when you go to a 100,000
you've got to do things differently.
How do we get to that 100,000 chargers?
And designing the infrastructure
is the problem we're trying to solve.
Are we trying to get it down to
there is one above ground solution
or do we select for three options
depending on the site characteristics?
- [Tiff] I lean towards the latter.
- Okay.
- This is probably the most
vans charging at the same time.
There's a hundred on that means like
the system's handling a hundred at a time.
It's 2022, and we're delivering a major project
with signatories from The Climate Pledge.
- I mean, if you look at these
the chargers have a profile that works for vans
but by and large
these are meant for residential applications.
- And, yeah, we're standing here
with a hundred vans plugged in
and a year ago, we hadn't even figured out
what the layout was gonna look like.
(upbeat music)
(audience applauding)
- We need actual data to come back
and these are like, this is the first step!
(audience applauding)
- As we look at the challenges in front of us
with regards to our climate crisis
it's so important that we as society
find opportunities like this to collaborate.
(audience applauding)
(gentle music)
There's zero debate that we as society
if we wanna live the way we live today
hundreds of years from now, thousands of years from now
we must move to renewable energy sources.
So accelerating that represents, I think
the only responsible thing we can do as a planet
and if we choose not to do that, we're rolling the dice.
So of course, I'm an optimist
so I think we can make that change
and it's the reason I started Rivian
it's the reason The Climate Pledge is so important.
- There are multiple really hard problems
on the path to decarbonization.
- The greater we can work together
and forge partnerships to accelerate these solutions
that's the opportunity that
The Climate Pledge represents to me.
(audience applauding)
- We go into it knowing that there are things
that we're going to learn as we do this
and we have some great momentum with the industry today
that we can reach out to partners to say
"Let's do this, help us do this."
(bright music)