Research Overview

Amazon, the eCommerce behemoth, has been making steady strides in the automotive industry and larger mobility landscape over the past decade. The company is slowly building relevant capabilities using a focused approach, giving it a foothold across automotive CASE and retail avenues.

When it comes to connected vehicles, Amazon’s primary offering is Amazon Web Services, which offers a whole host of services for automotive companies across three key cloud computing models, namely, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, and Software as a Service. This offers automotive companies various services, including data storage, data computing, data analytics, networking, enterprise solutions, data security, and developer tools. The services are offered in a pay-as-you-go pricing model, offering customers the flexibility to choose their most required services. Another offering in the connected vehicles space is the Alexa voice assistant from Amazon. As of 2020, there are about 100,000 Alexa skills, of which 161 relate to connected cars. It plans to develop and launch skills for various in-vehicle HMI features such as center stack, instrument cluster, HUD, and RSE system in the future.

In the autonomous realm, Amazon focuses on investments and acquisitions aimed primarily at automating every stage of its fulfillment in the future. Analysis of the company’s investments and acquisitions indicate that they would like to automate last mile, middle mile, and warehouse operations across the globe. In terms of autonomous passenger transportation, the only significant move the company has made is the acquisition of Zoox, a US-based company that is building a robotaxi. This vehicle can be used for enabling autonomous ridesharing services of the future. Amazon is also making significant forays in the last-mile food delivery space. The company invested in Deliveroo in the United Kingdom, and in 2020, it launched the Amazon Food delivery service in India.