Amazon.com, Inc. – Akshayan Muthusamypillai – 2022
Goals
As part of their commitment to The Climate Pledge to become net-zero by 2040, Amazon is looking for ways to reduce their carbon emissions from transport. Converting its Milk Run (ML) and Line Haul (LH) trucks to ZEV remains a major milestone towards this goal. Akshayan Muthusamypillai was tasked with developing a comprehensive roadmap that would guide Amazon to transition its fleet towards ZEV.
Solutions
Akshayan identified the following three tasks to create a comprehensive roadmap:
- Research: Collated various reports and research papers to extract data for the roadmap as well as consulted with external stakeholders to validate the inputs and understand the regulatory, technology, and economics of ZEV
- Fleet Analysis: Akshayan collaborated with various internal teams to collect existing fleet data and understand the technological requirements for Amazon.
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model: Created an Excel-based TCO model examining different technologies (BEV, HFCEV, HICE) and created comprehensive outputs to visualize the outputs. The TCO model provides cost competitiveness of different technologies until 2035.
Potential Impact
Key recommendations across different segments and vehicle types were derived from the TCO model outputs. These recommendations would assist Amazon’s The Climate Pledge Fund of $2 billion to transform MHDV and HDV fleet into ZEV fleet. The document also specified the targets’ technological costs of ZEV to breakeven with ICE.
The TCO model serves as a practical calculator for Amazon to project the cost competitiveness of the technologies across geographies, acting as a reference to negotiate technological requirements. This model was designed to assist business users; hence it is designed to be flexible and function with nominal efforts.
