Amazon to expand EV fleet to more than 20,000 by next year for transport of goods

Leading e-commerce company, Amazon India plans to expand its fleet size to more than 20,000 vehicles by next year from around 15,000 right now, for transportation of products across the country and most of them will be electric vehicles (EVs) — from two-wheelers to small commercial vehicles to bigger trucks — a top official said on Tuesday.

The increase in its fleet size would support the movement of customer shipments between facilities, across cities and along national freight corridors, Abhinav Singh, Vice President, Operations – India, APAC and MEA – at Amazon, told businessline.

“It’s a continuous journey where we are looking to accelerate the electric vehicle fleet. The government schemes are a tailwind – the FAME (Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Hybrid and Electric Vehicles) scheme then the Delhi government EVs in a big way was a tailwind...so you’ll find a very large percentage of our fleet moving to electric,” Singh said.

The company is also using vehicles run on bio-diesel and Railways, as a significant double-digit percentage, as part of its logistics, he said. “In 2020, we announced that we wanted 10,000 electric vehicles in our fleet by 2025.

We worked with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) across-the-board...all sizes of OEMs, and we were able to build that fleet one year ahead of goal. So we were able to get 10,000 EVs in our fleet by 2024. Today, we have over 15,000 EVs in our fleet, across the country in over 500 cities,” Singh explained.

The company on Tuesday partnered with Tata Motors to deploy 3,000 electric trucks in next three years — light and medium-duty electric trucks — across its middle-mile transportation network. The next phase will see the deployment expand to major national highways, with the ambition of electrifying the 2,800-km Delhi–Bengaluru–Chennai corridor along NH48 — India’s longest freight corridor — spanning seven States and connecting six of the country’s largest e-commerce regions, he said.

Singh added that Amazon is also setting up more charging yards across the country from 10 right now where multiple vehicles can be fast-charged simultaneously. These yards are situated near to its fulfilment centres in Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai.

The company also has partnered with other OEMs such as Ashok Leyland, Mahindra & Mahindra, Kinetic Green, Altigreen, etc.