Amazon partners with GM and Volvo to launch in-car package delivery service for Prime subscribers in 37 cities in the US
New service in collaboration with GM and Volvo will launch in 37 cities in the US — Last year, Amazon asked for permission to unlock your front door …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third act of a slow build. Amazon first tested vehicle delivery with Audi in a Munich trunk-delivery pilot in 2015, then reportedly lined up smartlock maker August and garage-access startup Garageio for in-home deliveries in 2016. Today's GM and Volvo partnership scales the car-as-delivery-destination idea from one European pilot to 37 US cities for Prime subscribers.
It also fits a broader Amazon pattern of owning the last 50 feet: the company is simultaneously building its own branded fleet with 20,000 Mercedes-Benz vans run by third-party operators, and the later expansion of in-garage delivery to roughly 4,000 US cities suggests the access-based delivery model kept compounding after this launch.
First-order effects
- Prime subscribers driving GM and Volvo vehicles in the 37 launch cities can now have packages delivered into their parked cars, with Amazon granted remote access to the vehicle.
- GM and Volvo become the first automakers in the US to open their connected cars to a retailer's delivery network, converting vehicle telematics into a customer-retention perk.
Second-order effects
- Other automakers face a choice between building similar delivery-access integrations or ceding the in-car channel to whoever partners with Amazon first — GM is already hedging with its own play, Cruise's food-delivery test with DoorDash in San Francisco.
- Amazon's own growing delivery fleet gives it the logistics layer to route these in-car drops, tightening its grip on the last mile relative to carriers and rivals without vehicle access partnerships.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, cars join front doors and garages as remotely unlockable delivery surfaces — and the automaker's connected-car platform, not the retailer's driver, becomes the gatekeeper of the final drop-off point.
- The trajectory from a single Audi trunk pilot to a 37-city launch and later mass-scale garage delivery points toward delivery access becoming a standard connected-car feature that automakers license to commerce platforms.
The trend: Last-mile delivery is moving beyond the doorstep to connected vehicles and garages, with automakers licensing remote access to their cars as a new distribution channel for retailers.