Amazon's delivery network fleet has been a boon to auto manufacturers

Amazon, the major online retailer, has been building up a fleet of 30,000 last-mile delivery vehicles since starting up its own delivery efforts in 2018 and currently handles around 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% 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% increase from the same period a year ago, according to Cox.

Amazon, which long relied on the U.S. Postal Service, United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp. for shipments, has increasingly made door-to-door deliveries on its own. The Seattle-based company has outsourced much of the work to an army of independent contractors and used its bulk-buying power to secure better prices on their vehicles, fuel and insurance.

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