We all have the same complaint. I want to order stuff off of Amazon, but I also want the metaphysical feeling of buying it from a store. I don’t want to actually buy things from a store, mind you, but I want to pretend that I did. Amazon and Audi are here to help, by delivering packages not straight to you, but straight to the trunk of your car.
In all seriousness, the line of thinking isn’t completely terrible, and reflects a real and popular need. When a package is delivered, the delivery company often needs someone to sign off on the delivery, or, at the very least, needs someone present to open the door. But Amazon and Audi have combined their heads to come up with a system that solves that problem. Essentially, the delivery guy will just leave it in the trunk of your car. Via the Financial Times:
When ordering, Amazon customers will indicate the rough location of the vehicle and desired delivery time. A DHL delivery agent will later be notified of the exact location via a smartphone app.
The agent is granted one-time keyless access to the boot of the vehicle and when the boot is shut again, it locks automatically. The customer must agree for their vehicles to be tracked for a specific timeframe and is notified via email upon successful delivery.
And even better yet, Audi’s working on a system that enables you to just leave stuff in the trunk of your car, parking wherever it is you need to be that day, and then someone from Amazon will just come pick your package up out of the trunk, and you’ll be none the busier for it.
At the moment, the whole thing is just a trial program around Munich, and if you want to participate you’ll need to have your car retrofitted with a system that allows DHL randos to access your trunk.
But this is all begging a huge question. Are there privacy concerns with this? Sure! Do you really want to let Amazon and DHL know where your car is? Do you really want some random delivery guy having the ability to root around the trunk of your car, even once? And doesn’t access to the trunk often mean access to the rest of the vehicle as well, even if it’s by the pass-through in the middle of the rear seat?
Audi says that “security is a top priority,” however, though they’re not really giving any details just yet as to what that means exactly.
Photo credit: M93