Amazon Is Getting Into The Autonomous Trucking Business

While Jeff Bezos may be out at Amazon, his plans for conquering every single industry on Earth while maintaining Amazon’s unholy dominance in e-commerce seem to be firmly in tact. 

Along those lines, Amazon announced this week that it had placed an order for 1,000 autonomous driving systems from self-driving truck technology startup Plus – and that it had also acquired an option to as much as a 20% stake in the company, according to Bloomberg. 

Amazon will now have “the right to buy preferred shares of Plus via a warrant at a price of $0.46647 per share”, equating to about a 20% stake based on Plus’s pre-SPAC-merger share count, the report notes.

The move could have obvious implications for both the autonomous vehicle industry, where other key players like Tesla and Workhorse will take note of Amazon’s entrance into the area – and in logistics, where Amazon is pushing the envelope forward for all e-commerce companies to consider how they handle their own logistics internally. 

Plus is headquartered in Cupertino, California and backed by Sequoia Capital China. It is developing autonomous technology for long-haul trucking, the report says. It currently is set to have a valuation of $3.3 billion and it raised $150 million in a recent PIPE deal with names like BlackRock and D.E. Shaw. 

Among its other investors are Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp., GSR Ventures Management and a Chinese long-haul company known in English as Full Truck Alliance.

Plus has also worked with Chinese delivery company SF Holding Co., which uses Plus-enabled trucks that can cover about 932 miles per day. State owned entity China FAW Group Co. has plans of “mass production” for jointly developed trucks with Plus beginning as soon as this quarter, Bloomberg noted.

The potential investment from Amazon isn’t all that surprising, as Plus recently hired Chuck Joseph, formerly of Amazon, to help the company scale up production and promote its technology.