E-commerce boon to the auto industry - The Columbian

NEW YORK — The Amazon.com Inc. vans parked outside apartment buildings and along suburban cul-de-sacs aren’t just bearing gifts to online shoppers this holiday season. The e-commerce giant’s home-delivery push has been a boon to automakers, too.

Amazon has built up a fleet of 30,000 last-mile delivery trucks and vans since creating its own delivery network in 2018, and currently handles about half of its own deliveries. That’s good news for manufacturers of increasingly ubiquitous gray vans with the blue swoosh, which include Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV and Ford Motor Co.

Carmakers have been coping with declining demand from consumers this year in part by boosting deliveries to commercial customers including Amazon and its delivery contractors. Sales to fleets, including rental-car companies and governments, are on pace for a record year, having already exceeded 2.6 million units through November, according to Cox Automotive.

“A lot of those vans are going to build out Amazon’s small-package delivery in metro areas,” said Evan Armstrong, president of Armstrong & Associates, a Milwaukee-based logistics research and consulting firm. “There’s going to be an opportunity because e-commerce is growing so fast, and these networks are growing as well.”

Armstrong estimates that e-commerce logistics costs in the U.S. have grown 19 percent this year to $168 billion, about half of which is spending on transportation. Commercial vehicle sales totaled more than 734,000 through November of this year, an 8.7 percent increase from the same period a year ago, according to Cox.

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December 23, 2019 at 09:00PM
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E-commerce boon to the auto industry - The Columbian
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