Amazon’s Answer to Uber — Part 1

TBD Insider — Product Reviews from the Near Future

I was honored to be one of the first beta passengers on Amazon’s latest venture, point-to-point human delivery service, Carriage. Here’s the experience in a nutshell:

“Help! I’m in a nutshell! How did I get into this nutshell? Look at the size of this bloody great big nutshell! What sort of shell has a nut like this?”

Ok, I couldn’t resist, and yes, if you got that reference, you qualify for the #I’mNotAMillenial club. But seriously, the experience was totally unlike what you’d expect if you just heard the premise, which sounds as if Amazon’s got into the business of boxing up people and delivering them to your doorstep like a sack of diapers.

I downloaded the Carriage app and was presented with what looked more or less like any ridesharing app: Where are you now, and where do you want to go? But it also asks when you want to be at your destination. So, for example, I live in Berkeley and needed to be in Palo Alto at Norwest Venture Partners office on University Ave at 9am for a meeting. Driving at that time of day, I’d have had to leave no later than 7am (two hours of rush-hour traffic and associated road rage), but the Carriage app gave me a comfortable window of 8am, which surprised me.

I hit the “DeliverMe” button on the app at around 7:15 and then sat down to finish breakfast. At 7:40, I got a text that my Carriage was arriving, and sure enough, I could see the delivery vehicle approaching on the map — this is early days, so there was only one on the map in Berkeley — and I heard the windy sound of a vehicle the size of a bus lumbering up the street in front of my house.

I leisurely finished my coffee, pleased to not worry about running out to the curb before the driver got frustrated and drove away. I even poured myself another cup to go. In the meantime, a “Carriage” was deposited in front of my driveway by the driverless delivery vehicle before driving itself away. (I noticed later that a bored-looking Amazon employee was in the cab of the big vehicle to take over, of course, and I’m told that the drivers still take over a lot on surface streets. This isn’t science fiction, after all.)

The Carriage was beautifully designed — all glossy white with rounded, vanishing edges that gave it the appearance of an egg, even though the main body was more box-like to accommodate packing and maximize the interior space for the “cargo,” me!

As I approached, the pressure-door hissed open, and my name appeared on the side in blue letters. Ever see the movie, WALL-E? This was like Eve’s chunkier brother. I hopped in, and this is where the real luxury of the experience kicked in for me, making the best UberSelect limo seem like riding in a 1970s-era Crown-Vic Yellow Cab.

First, I didn’t have to scrunch into a back seat. I walked in, barely lifting my feet higher than a step — owing to the fact that the carriage rested on short rails close to the ground — and hardly bending my neck. Then, a cushy lounge-like seat wrapped itself around me. And there I sat, but oh, I could have sat there all day. A modern glossy-white desk table emerged from the console in front of me, just below a wall-to-wall high-def screen set up for either entertainment or quick-and-easy laptop display. And reminiscent of Kindle’s free Whisper wireless download service, the Carriage comes with free high-speed wifi, and the coverage and speed was impressive. I found myself thinking that I should order a Carriage to sit in front of my house as a personal office on days when my kids won’t stop banging on the door of my home-office.

Amazon is starting small with this service but has big plans. In the second of this two-part review, I’ll tell you about my first journey in the Amazon Carriage, and you’ll discover if I got there alive and unharmed.

If you like this “product review,” subscribe to TBDInsider for a new story every Wednesday and Sunday morning.

This story is fiction, based entirely on our fevered imagination of products and services that could be delivered to market based on current and emerging know-how — given sufficient resource and intent. Any resemblance to real products, either released or planned, is purely coincidental.