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Text | Deng Simiao
Source: Smart Car Reference
Quite abruptly, Amazon shut down its self-driving delivery vehicle project.
You must know that before this, this is an important part of Amazon’s future innovation and exploration, and it is an important component around unmanned supermarkets and drone delivery.
But now, Amazon has chosen to shut down after exploration – the 400-person team is facing disbandment and transfer, and the unmanned delivery vehicle that has served for three years has come to an end.
What’s even more shocking is that the decision to shut down came a little off-guard, after all, four months ago, Amazon held a product launch for the project.
So what happened to Amazon’s unmanned delivery vehicle project?
Amazon shuts down autonomous delivery vehicle project
Amazon’s project, named Scout, has been in beta until now.
But the team is already a big one, with a scale of more than 400 people, and the investment of various resources is not cheap.
Amazon once also concentrated its elite soldiers into this innovative project, but now it can only be transferred internally after the shutdown.
LinkedIn public information shows that some team members plan to leave Amazon to find new job opportunities.
Some members expressed unwillingness and planned to stay in the team to continue to explore the prospect of unmanned vehicle research and development.
The shutdown came too suddenly. After all, 4 months ago, Amazon officially held a self-driving car promotion event in the community.
Many children came to watch and seemed to be popular with local residents.
As for the reason for the shutdown, Amazon spokeswoman Alisa Carroll said:
In our limited testing grounds, we worked hard to create a unique home delivery experience for our customers, but many customers reported that autonomous vehicles did not meet their needs in some ways.
Therefore, we will suspend the offline field test and readjust the project. During this transition, we will help people within the team to match them with suitable jobs.
In one sentence, the Scout self-driving car is not doing well enough at this stage.
External reasons can refer to Amazon’s recent retail sales.
According to the financial report data, Amazon’s net retail sales in Q1 this year were US$116.4 billion, a year-on-year increase of 7%; this year’s Q2 net retail sales were US$121.2 billion, a year-on-year increase of 7%.
Compared with last year and the previous year, Q1 net retail sales in 2021 increased by 44% year-on-year, and Q2 net retail sales in 2021 increased by 27% year-on-year; Q1 net retail sales in 2020 increased by 26% year-on-year, and Q2 net retail sales in 2020 increased year-on-year 40%.
It can be seen that the growth of retail, as Amazon’s core business, is slowing down significantly. In addition, the global environment is not optimistic. As an innovative project, there is no rigid demand and return in a short period of time, and it can only be throttled at this stage.
Not only unmanned delivery vehicle projects, such as Amazon Glow, which focuses on the development of video calling equipment for children, has been suspended, and the Amazon care project, which provides telemedicine services, has also been axed.
It is worth noting that Amazon’s retail team has also suspended recruitment.
The chill is being passed on to every exploratory project that is not yet on the right track.
Scout unmanned delivery vehicle explores these 3 years
The Amazon Scout unmanned delivery vehicle will officially begin field testing in 2019.
Waterproof, six-wheeled, and small, it was developed, built, assembled, and programmed by Amazon engineers in a Seattle lab.
The wheels are made of sturdy materials, and the body is also surrounded by cameras, ultrasonic radar and other sensors.
A self-driving car generally slides slowly on a sidewalk in a given course, but if blocked by an obstacle, it will instead drive on the street.
When crossing the road, the driverless car will start to flash, the purpose is to send a signal to alert cyclists and drivers of passing vehicles.
Amazon said the Scout self-driving car can monitor and avoid pets, pedestrians and various obstacles on the road in real time.
They say the technology can be quickly validated in the lab, enabling the rapid prototyping of hardware components and the ability to write new code without waiting for software updates.
Six units were initially deployed in Snohomish County, Washington, USA, delivering packages during the day from Monday to Friday, accompanied by an employee.
The employee is primarily responsible for picking up deliveries from the driverless cars and placing them on the steps of various doorsteps. Mainly because the Scout self-driving car can’t go up the stairs on its own.
The service was later expanded to more communities in the United States, including Irvine, California; Atlanta, Georgia; and Franklin, Tennessee.
As usual, local users can enjoy self-driving delivery services by simply purchasing items on the Amazon app or website.
In addition, Scout’s self-driving car has also been tested in cooperation with the World Institute of Disabled Persons to improve the interactive experience between self-driving cars and people with disabilities.
In short, although this unmanned delivery vehicle cannot completely replace human delivery, it is not useless to a certain extent, especially in the United States, where labor costs are high, the land is sparsely populated, and the delivery timeliness requirements are not so strict.
This is also one of the reasons why the outside world did not understand when Amazon shut down its unmanned delivery vehicle project.
But Amazon’s shutdown of its unmanned delivery vehicle project is not without warning.
Because the core leader, former vice president Sean Scott (Sean Scott), has left before that.
Sean Scott has worked at Amazon for 14 years and 9 months, including more than 4 years with the Scout unmanned delivery vehicle, leading the entire team to develop equipment, systems and specific operations. He left the project in January last year and moved to PagerDuty, a US cloud computing company, as chief product development officer.
He later expressed that the value of change brought by unmanned delivery vehicles is still far from the expected value, and that the industrial value brought by cloud computing may be greater.
This may somewhat represent the conclusion of Amazon’s top management. Correspondingly, although Amazon has cut off the unmanned delivery vehicle project, the development of unmanned delivery in the air — the drone delivery project — Amazon prime air has not Shut down all together, and even increase investment.
Exploration status of unmanned delivery mode
In fact, in terms of landing and scarcity, the advantages of unmanned distribution in the air are significantly greater than that of unmanned distribution on the ground.
First of all, the aerial scene is relatively simple, the challenges of target recognition and avoidance are much smaller, and the path planning is also simpler and more direct, which can achieve more efficient distribution.
Secondly, aerial drone distribution provides incremental value, while ground unmanned distribution has the challenge of replacing existing human work, with natural “enemies”, fire prevention, theft and human damage, and the air can take the lead in delivering high-efficiency , high-demand items – such as medicines, etc., are easier to demonstrate commercial and social value, and easier to price.
Finally, although it also faces the qualification problem of “right of way”, drone delivery is aimed at low-altitude areas, which are blank areas, while unmanned vehicles need to change the existing road regulations and responsibility determination, and the relationship is more and more closely.
Of course, drone distribution also has corresponding challenges, such as low-altitude and changeable climate factors, as well as consequent safety issues, etc. More importantly, the distribution radius will also be limited – once the market demand can not support, in the end It is difficult to achieve a balance of revenue, which is why Google chose to stop after the pilot operation of drone delivery. It is really not suitable for a sparsely populated area.
In China, unmanned delivery vehicles and drone delivery, the two explorations are still advancing in parallel.
Thanks to the high-density urban environment and market demand, technology retail-related companies, including Alibaba, JD.com, and Meituan, are exploring, and there are many star companies that start their own businesses.
Among them, Meituan is the most representative company with two legs in parallel. It not only has the landing test of unmanned delivery vehicles, and has shown value in epidemic prevention and control, but also has drone delivery—and it has been commercialized in Shenzhen.
Ali, on the other hand, has placed unmanned delivery vehicles in relatively closed ODD areas—college campuses—in the way of a little donkey. It can take the lead in accumulating operational experience and data before the regulations related to right-of-way qualifications are clarified.
So if you were inspired by the progress of Meituan and Ali Xiaomanlu before, now Amazon has brought a basin of rational cold water – especially startups.
Because Amazon’s shutdown of unmanned delivery vehicles, although it is a family decision, has specific influencing factors.
However, it still reflects the disapproval of the model to a certain extent, whether it is the feasibility of technical implementation or the realization time of commercial prospects…
The shutdown of Amazon’s unmanned delivery vehicles is a wake-up call for the industry:
As an end-to-end platform, Amazon has both supply and demand in its hands, and it still feels powerless to the landing of unmanned delivery vehicles. Why can you be different?
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