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.

An Einride spokesperson confirmed that a “warrant contract asset” of 1.5 billion Swedish kronor (roughly $160 million) on the company’s balance sheet represents the Amazon warrants. It is the largest single asset on Einride’s books, worth more than its trucks and more than its cash.

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.

Tesla Semis are already hauling some Amazon freight. Nevoya, an all-electric trucking carrier based in Southern California, says it runs Amazon loads using Tesla Semis.

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 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 did not respond to questions about the arrangement.

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with comment from Einride. It was also corrected to note that Tesla Semis already haul Amazon freight for Nevoya, an electric trucking carrier.

We’ve been following Canadian startup Edison Motors for some time now, but their latest offering caught us a bit off guard — their BDE series truck will be offered first without the electric hybrid drive that first piqued our interest. They make a good case for why in the video below, in which the production prototype tows around a junked Nikola semi as a sort of memento mori of what Edison does not want to end up as.

Now, make no mistake: Edison Motors is going to be selling the series-hybrid version of these big rigs eventually. That truck will have a Scania diesel rated at 500 kW driving electric motors rated at a combined 1800 kW peak power — that’s 2400 ponies. Along with the diesel generator those ponies will be driven by a big o’l battery, but none of that is in the truck in the video. It’s the same cab, and the same frame, but in order to get some revenue in while jumping regulatory hurdles and working the kinks out of the hybrid drive, they put a conventional Cummins diesel and 16-speed transmission in the “Big D” as the truck is known.

The business case makes sense: they don’t want to have their single new product hit a snag, possibly require a recall, and fall into bankruptcy the way the electric truck company Nikola did. The conventional drivetrain also lets them prove their engineering prowess to companies that might like the idea of a Made-in-Canada truck, but be nervous about new technology from a new company.

If you want to know more about the whole diesel-electric scheme, we covered that last year. Edison also has plans to offer its hybrid drive technology for smaller trucks in kit form, which is perhaps the most exciting part from a hacker perceptive.

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip!