Amazon partners with Audi for pilot program delivering packages to trunks of customers' vehicles in Munich, Germany
Chris Bryant / Financial Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
The Munich pilot is the earliest data point in what becomes a multi-year arc of Amazon turning vehicles into delivery addresses: three years later it scales the same idea to Prime subscribers across 37 US cities with GM and Volvo signing on for in-car package delivery.
The carmaker relationship also deepens on the software side — by 2019, Audi and BMW agree to include Alexa in some models by default, putting Amazon's assistant inside the same vehicles whose trunks it now opens. That matters because Amazon is simultaneously rebuilding its own last-mile fleet, ordering 20,000 Mercedes-Benz vans for its third-party-run branded delivery network, giving it both the endpoint access and the physical capacity to make trunk drops routine.
First-order effects
- Prime customers in Munich gain a delivery point that requires no one home — the trunk replaces doorstep and pickup-point handoffs for participating Audi owners.
- Audi gets a connected-car service differentiator it can market to buyers, while Amazon gets a controlled, GPS-verifiable drop location in a dense European city.
Second-order effects
- Other automakers face a choice between partnering or ceding the trunk to Amazon: GM and Volvo take the partner path in the US within three years, validating the model at scale.
- Alternative access providers — smartlock and garage startups like August and Garageio, which Amazon later works with for in-home delivery — compete to solve the same no-one-home problem through the house rather than the car.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the vehicle becomes standing infrastructure in retail logistics — a roaming parcel locker whose access is brokered by whoever controls the car's software platform, extending the Amazon–Apple–Google contest from dashboards into commerce itself.
The trend: Last-mile delivery is dissolving into the connected car itself, with automakers trading trunk and dashboard access for relevance in the retail ecosystem.