Amazon is quietly accumulating a stake in Einride, the Swedish electric trucking company that said Tuesday it will deploy 500 Tesla Semis for Amazon and other customers.
Einride’s SEC filings show Amazon holding warrants for 25.2 million shares — about 12% of the company — that vest as Amazon buys freight services. The company’s financial report Tuesday, its first since going public in June, has the warrants on its books for the first time.
At the same time, Einride is relying heavily on Amazon for growth, forecasting a 60% to 73% year-over-year revenue increase in the second half, “fueled by the Amazon ramp and other deployments in the U.S. and Europe,” as the company said in its earnings release.
Amazon announced in April that Einride would deploy 75 electric trucks with charging at five U.S. sites in its middle-mile network, the leg between warehouses and delivery stations.
Tesla Semi rollout: Einride also said Tuesday it will deploy 500 Tesla Semis across North America, calling it the largest deployment of Tesla’s electric big rigs in the world to date. The trucks will serve Amazon and other Einride customers on freight corridors in California, Texas, New Jersey, Illinois and Georgia, rolling out in phases over two years beginning in September, financed by third parties.
This appears to be the first time Tesla Semis will haul Amazon freight. PepsiCo runs the largest fleet of Tesla Semis, close to 100 trucks, but Amazon has never been a named user.
Amazon’s electric semis: Amazon has been turning to other manufacturers to electrify its freight network beyond the last-mile delivery vans it buys from Rivian. It deployed nearly 50 Volvo electric semis at Southern California ports and ordered more than 200 electric big rigs from Mercedes-Benz for Europe, part of a pledge to reach net-zero carbon across its operations by 2040.
Einride, for its part, doesn’t sell trucks. It buys and finances them, hires the drivers or contracts carriers, builds the charging infrastructure, and hauls a customer’s freight for a fee — using its own software, called Saga AI, to plan routes around charging windows and battery range.
The pitch to a shipper like Amazon is that it gets electric trucking capacity without purchasing vehicles itself or creating electric charging infrastructure.
Long-term autonomy: Einride is also one of a small group of companies running fully driverless trucks in commercial service in the U.S., with Level 4 autonomous vehicles operating in Ohio and more than 5,400 driverless hours logged for customers as of June 30.
The trucks hauling Amazon’s freight, however, have drivers, as will the Tesla Semis, for now. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on the company’s July earnings call that self-driving capability for the Semi is about a year away. That timeline would fall inside Einride’s two-year rollout.
Einride’s Amazon deal: Roozbeh Charli, the Einride CEO, said on the earnings call Tuesday that the April announcement with Amazon brought a wave of new business.
The takeaway for customers about Einride was, “If these guys can handle the complexity of Amazon’s network, they can handle ours,” he said, explaining that there was “quite a lot of inbound” following the news.
Charli said customers rarely specify hardware, and that Einride selects truck platforms based on the routes and the data. That would suggest that Einride chose the Tesla Semis, not Amazon.
The Amazon warrants did not come up on the call. The terms have been technically public since April, buried in an exhibit to Einride’s merger filings with the SEC, but haven’t been previously reported, in part because Einride’s prospectuses refer to Amazon as “the Specified Party.”
Amazon’s financial arrangement with Einride follows a pattern.
- The company struck a similar deal with Plug Power in 2017, taking warrants for up to 55.3 million shares that vested as Amazon bought fuel-cell equipment for its warehouses.
- Amazon invested in Rivian in early 2019, then ordered 100,000 electric delivery vans from the startup later that year. The company owns about 12% of Rivian today.
Amazon and Einride did not immediately respond to questions about the arrangement.
