Although Amazon hasn’t created any car of its own so far, it turns out that the company has already got a huge influence on the modern automotive market. Undeniably, cutting-edge technologies allow many establishments to thrive while being in the automotive industry without actually producing or even selling the machinery. Many drivers and passengers and even not aware how many functions Amazon have today in the world of vehicles.
If you want to learn more about some of them, this article will provide you with some interesting information on the topic.
Amazon is a large retailer of car accessories and parts
Although selling cars themselves is an extremely profitable business, car accessories and parts retailing can also generate large income. For example, the statistics for 2020 collected by Hedges & Company which is one of the leading marketing agencies working for the automotive market except the car part retailers to have made a total of deals worth up to $16 billion. At the same time, purchases made via Amazon will have been worth by the end of 2020.
It is obvious that Amazon has a large impact on the market of car-related items. Partially, this is the result of the sophisticated functions of Amazon Garage which is a particularly convenient service for making online purchases of car parts. Generally, Amazon Garage helps drivers to save a lot of time avoiding wasting countless hours searching for the accessories and other items suitable exactly for your model of the car. The programme allows you to specify the exact model of your car so as Amazon will be able to supply you exclusively with related information. Amazon Garage won’t ask you for any highly specific information about your car such as its VIN number or the number of the licence plate.
Needless to say, this is a highly useful feature of the service which will help you to make your purchases quickly and in the most comfortable way.
Amazon services for supporting vehicle sells
At the moment, Amazon has a rather limited function of actual car retailing. For example, one of its current its current projects is selling cars in Italy in a partnership with Fiat. Yet, the company is planning to participate in the vehicle sales a lot.
So far, Amazon is offering its large service known as Amazon Vehicles which is focusing on offering car purchasers the information about buying vehicle. The majority of the content of the service is about the reviews of used cars and well as new cars. Still, Amazon is planning to add more functions to its service making it possible to get connections with local dealers offering the vehicles which the customers are interested in.
Even though there has been no official tool for selling cars via Amazon Vehicles up to now, the service is widely used by dealers and manufacturers for this purpose unofficially. For instance, the bots powered by Amazon Lex are used by many retailers in order to provide their clients with essential information available in the natural language.
Amazon’s voice assistant used in modern cars
There is no way you haven’t heard about the Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant which is currently one of the most popular on the market. In all likelihood, you have already had an opportunity to use it.
Many ne models of passenger cars today are equipped with the Alexa voice assistant which can perform various functions. Actually, so far, there are nearly a hundred of models using Alexa.
Alexa can do various things for drivers when those ask the assistant without choosing the options manually. For instance, the assistant can open the door of your garage or tell you the weather forecast. Furthermore, there is a new partnership between such gas station companies as Mobil and Exxon with Amazon which can now accept payments for refilling your car directly from Alexa. Once you are at the gas station, it is enough to ask Alexa to pay for gas and it will identify the exact pump and proceed to the payment using the credit card chosen by default in the Amazon account you have.
Amazon’s electric cargo vans
Even though there is still no cars designed by Amazon itself, soon, you will find the electric vehicles created by this company cooperating with the Rivian startup. This startup is working on the project of electric vans for Amazon planning to release at least 100,000 of such cars by the year of 2030 since this is exactly the amount of vehicles order by Amazon.
Amazon is also planning to create a special charging network for its cars.
Amazon’s autonomous vehicles
Another startup working with Amaozn in the automotive world right now is Zoox which is worth 1.3.billion USD.
The major goal of Zoox is designing an entire network of taxis using self-driving cars, yet, there is high possibility that the project will be extended by adding a delivery service without human drivers.