Amazon delivery vans ship 20 million packages every day. That’s a lot of wear and tear, but the technology giant has found a way to reduce the time spent on inspecting its fleet of more than 100,000 vehicles.
Vehicle inspections are crucial for both quality control and maintenance, but they take time. And in the bustling environments of manufacturing or fleet management, every second counts. Finding ways to reduce inspection times without compromising standards or (worse) overlooking a serious defect is a difficult balancing act that companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get right.
New Jersey-based UVeye has spent almost a decade developing its own unique approach to vehicle inspection using computer vision. With funding from Toyota Tsusho, Volvo and Hyundai Motors, the company has developed tools for inspecting vehicle undercarriages, outer bodies and interiors. Now, Amazon joins UVeye’s growing list of customers, which also includes CarMax and GM.
According to a press release from UVeye, the startup will begin rolling out its vehicle inspection systems across hundreds of Amazon warehouses in the U.S., Canada, Germany and the U.K. This follows a trial phase, during which the UVeye system identified issues that are often overlooked during manual inspections, including damage to the undercarriage and nails in the tire treads.
“Each new feature and improvement has brought us closer to where we are today, and we are so proud of the system, which is now being scaled to administer tens of millions of inspections a year,” said UVeye co-founder and CEO Amir Hever in the press release. UVeye claims that its technology is currently used to scan over 2 million vehicles and 20 million tires every year.
Tom Chempananical, Global Fleet Director at Amazon Logistics, echoed Hever’s sentiment in the same release: “With over 100,000 Amazon-branded delivery vehicles on the road, bringing 20 million packages to our customers every day, we can automate most of the inspection process at scale,” he said. “This reduces the time spent on inspections by DSPs and delivery associates, ensuring packages reach customers faster while improving road safety.”
According to Amazon, a typical manual inspection takes approximately five minutes, while the UVeye system takes less than a minute to complete the inspection process. The ability to shave those valuable minutes from each inspection makes this partnership between the two companies a natural one, especially since the data that UVeye’s system collects and the AI software that processes it both run on Amazon Web Services.