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When the electric car startup Rivian was set to release its first vehicle in late 2021, the company made the unconventional choice. Instead of a more conventional neutral tone, it manufactured a significant amount of its initial production run in a custom color the company called Launch Green. It was a decision that ran counter to almost every color trend and automotive industry sales report, and one that’s come to shape the way the company builds out one of the most unique color palettes in the car business. “Everybody buys black, white, or gray. Pretty much every single brand, they’re going to have that. And it doesn’t matter if you’re in the U.S., you’re in China, you’re in Europe, that’s what it is,” says Jeff Hammoud, Rivian’s chief design officer. “Those are the ones that people order. But they’re not the ones that create the most buzz or excitement.” Launch Green, marketed as a limited run for the company’s R1T truck, bucked the trends and rose near the top of color rankings among Rivian fans and buyers. The Rivian forum on Reddit had such a heated debate over Launch Green’s merit that its moderator pinned a note to the top of the comments thread stating that it had been reported by some users for “incorrectly” placing Launch Green in second place. “I understand that many of you feel personally victimized by Launch Green not being #1. I encourage you to take a break from the internet or talk to a loved one for support,” the note read. Though the company doesn’t break down its sales figures publicly, Launch Green was immediately popular. Despite being a limited run, customers still ask for it nearly five years later. [Photo: Rivian] Colors that look good dirty Considering the approach validated, the company has since put an uncommon amount of effort into its color palette, not only creating unique custom colors but also making those colors an extension of Rivian’s adventure-centric, California-inspired brand. From L.A. Silver to El Cap Granite to Red Canyon to Storm Blue, Rivian’s paint options purposely lean into an outdoorsy theme. The company just announced another limited edition paint and trim package, California Dune, a pale sand color that evokes off-roading in the desert. [Image: Rivian] “We wanted something that like looked crisp and clean and premium,” Hammoud says. “If it’s dirty you can’t really tell. It’s not this car that you feel like you constantly have to clean, like a black car.” Rivian does offer its vehicles in black”Midnight” in the company’s parlancebut only reluctantly. Hammoud says Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe doesn’t like black, which he finds to be “not an optimistic color” and one that’s not exactly on brand. “But,” Hammoud says, “customers love it.” For some, Rivian’s colors may just look like slightly different versions of a blue or red that any other car company might use. But according to Hammoud, Rivian’s colors have been carefully developed to reflect a spirit of adventure, while also being bespoke to the brand. “We want it to have that warmth that our brand has, and also something that invites you to get it dirty,” he says. [Photo: Rivian] That approach to color has become so ingrained in the brand’s approach that Rivian hired its own in-house paint specialist, enabling it to develop new color options faster. Even so, adding new colors to the palettethere have been 12 so farrequires a significant investment of time and coordination with suppliers. “The fascias, the mirrors, the door handles, parts of the liftgates, none of those are actually painted at our plant,” Hammoud says. “So we have to work with all these different suppliers to essentially take that same color and make sure it matches identical.” [Photo: Rivian] Adding a new color can take years, but Hammoud says that limited color runs can happen much faster, since the company’s manufacturing facility in Normal, Illinois, can swap a color into the production line for a short time before returning to a more standard color. Bringing a new color like California Dune into the lineup for a limited run is another way for the company to generate some brand buzz. “It’s a fun and I wouldn’t say easy but a light lift for us to be able to go and add freshness to the vehicle by offering a new color,” Hammoud says. [Photo: Rivian] Rivian is also careful about when to take a color out of the lineup. One discontinued color, Compass Yellow, had consistently high Net Promoter Scores, a measure of how likely a customer is to recommend a product to others. “People were the most passionate about that color and Red Canyon, which are really low take rates for us,” Hammoud says. Though the yellow was dropped from the lineup, the red is still available. [Photo: Rivian] These color choices are partly driven by sales figures and customer demand, but Hammoud says the company’s overall approach to color is more closely tied to the adventurous image it’s trying to create with its off-road-ready truck and SUV models. The company pays attention to color trends in the automotive world, but isn’t concerned with simply keeping pace with competitors. “Everything we do from a color standpoint is influenced by the types of products that we think align with our brand, align with our customers. And a lot of that starts from outdoor adventure gear, footwear, backpacks,” Hammoud says. This extends to other sides of Rivian design, like the brand’s distinctive headlights, which were inspired by a rock climbing carabiner. [Photo: Rivian] But Hammoud says color may be one of the most important elements of Rivian’s vehicles. “Color is a big part of purchase consideration for people,” he says. Ultimately the cars are products, and the company is trying to sell them. Color, he argues, helps make the cars more distinctive, which leads to more customer interest, and maybe a foothold in a crowded marketplace. “Finding inspiration from outside of automotive is a big part of it,” Hammoud says. “If you don’t do that, you’re just going to feel like you’re every other car brand.”
Category:
E-Commerce
My worst workday habit is that I’m a compulsive web page checker. Throughout the day, I’m constantly refreshing the same handful of sites for updates. I’ll check the metrics on my newsletters, swing through a subreddit or two, and click through some tech news sitesand that’s before even getting to email and social media. Every time I do this, it’s hard to refocus. So I was pretty eager to try Aloha Browser’s new “Snips” feature, which uses AI to periodically monitor web pages and notify you when things change. I figured that by having AI check web pages on my behalf, I could avoid the urge to do so myself and be better at staying on task. It’s helped at least a little, but both Aloha and I still have some work to do. [Image: Aloha] How Snips works Snips is currently available in the desktop version of Aloha for Mac and Windows, appearing as a little box-and-scissors icon next to the address bar. Clicking the icon brings up a selector tool for highlighting the part of the page you want to keep track of. [Screenshot: Jared Newman] After selecting a snippet, you’ll see a menu for setting up alerts. Choose how often Aloha should check for updates (the default is once per day, but you can go as frequently as every five minutes), then write a sentence describing what changes it should watch for. For instance, if you wanted to monitor the price on a product page, you could write something like “notify me when the price falls below $300.” [Screenshot: Jared Newman] In my case, I’ve set up a handful of Snips to cut down on compulsive page checking: For the pages where I check on newsletter metrics, I’ve instructed Aloha to only notify me when certain parameters change. I like to check the New York Yankees subreddit, so I’ve asked Aloha to notify me when new posts are created. If I post on social media, I can create a temporary Snip that alerts me if the responses reach a certain threshold. I have alerts set up for when new stories appear on Techmeme, just to make sure I don’t miss anything important. For email, I have Aloha alert me of replies to existing conversation threads. Behind the scenes, Aloha uses on-device AI to analyze page content, then takes routine snapshots of the page to see if things change. For the notification requests, it uses a mix of on-device AI processing and large language models from Grok and OpenAI, but Aloha says no browsing data leaves your device in most cases. (The browser does send some especially complex tasks to a remote server for processing, but requires permission first and deletes the data immediately after.) Once you’ve created some Snips, they’ll appear as screenshots on Aloha’s new tab page. You can tweak the notifications from here, but you can also shuffle and resize the screenshots into a kind of glanceable information dashboard. Why it makes sense There are plenty of other ways to monitor information online. I use CamelCamelCamel for price alerts on Amazon, for instance, and you can always turn on push notifications for email and social media. [Image: Aloha] But Aloha’s Snips feature is a useful alternative because of how granular it can get. You can set up price alerts on any retail site without sharing your contact information, and you can limit social media notifications to specific types of responses or reactions. The alerts come through the Mac or Windows notification tray, so your email inbox and phone notifications stay uncluttered. Room for improvement That’s not to say Aloha’s Snips feature is perfect. It’s subject to the same vagaries as other generative AI tools, which means things may not always work as expected. For instance, I’ve experienced some instances of false positive notifications when nothing changes, or repeat notifications for things I’ve been alerted to already. Aloha’s page refresh capabilities also don’t seem to work 100% of the time. One snippet I set up for the “Newest” section on Techmeme refused to update, and Aloha showed error messages while trying to update standard Reddit pages. (As a work-around, I had to create a snippet on old.reddit.com instead.) If the information you need requires extra clicking or scrolling after reloading the page, it’s not going to work with Snips either. [Photo: Aloha] And even when things are working properly, I still have to provide the appropriate degree of willpower. I don’t need Aloha to check Reddit every five minutes, but if I set the interval to be too infrequent, I’ll likely get antsy and start checking it myself. That’s entirely a me problem. Aloha is not my main browser, and it was not really on my radar until the Snips feature arrived. It’s made by a small team based in Cyprus, and touts an emphasis on privacy, but I still prefer the power-user features in the likes of Vivaldi and Floorp. Even so, it’s easy enough to keep running in the background to discourage my compulsive checking habit. I’m going to keep doing that to take a little of the weight off my mind.
Category:
E-Commerce
An empty light truck is cruising along a sun-drenched highway of Qionghai, a city in Hainan Island, the southernmost part of China. As the car that’s filming overtakes it, we can see the truck has no driver. In fact, it doesnt even have a cabin: Its front is just a flat wall crowned by what looks to be sensors and cameras. Its an eerie and surreal view, a Headless Horseman of trucks just as scary as an actual headless horseman. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Ai Revolution (@aitherevolution) The futuristic yet cheap-looking vehicle is part of a fleet of driverless light trucks that can carry 1,000 parcels each completely unattended over a range of more than 110 miles. These vehicles, operated by Chinese logistics giant ZTO Express, are the vanguard of a silent, state-sponsored effort to revolutionize the way China ships goods around the country. Their fleet is already vastly outperforming the efforts of startups in the U.S. They navigate Hainans suburban and rurl routes thanks to an artificial intelligencepowered computer that sees the world in 3D using lasers and high-resolution cameras. The trucks are capable of obeying traffic lights, dodging obstacles, yielding to pedestrians, and “talking” to the road itself and other vehicles. The program began in November 2024 with a single vehicle, followed by three additional trucks as part of a pilot overseen by the Eastern Postal Administration of Hainan Province. Its director Zhang Zhi called it at its launch the beginning of a new intelligent era for the regions courier industry. The initial pilot focused on Qionghais campuses, commercial districts, and residential areas, but ZTO quickly expanded it throughout the island and the rest of China. Beijing turbocharge It’s just another step in Chinas road to automated logistics. The company already had experience with this autonomous technology for last-mile and long-haul logistics. In July 2024, ZTO launched autonomous delivery vans in Taizhousouth of Shanghaieach capable of carrying 600 to 800 parcels per tripdouble the capacity of human couriers. These vans, which started development in 2021, are equipped with 360-degree cameras and AI-trained obstacle detection. They now handle nearly a third of last-mile deliveries in Taizhous industrial zones. The vehicles use V2X (vehicle-to-everything) communication systems, a technology that allows them to talk to traffic lights, road sensors, and other vehicles in real time. Allegedly, V2X reduces collisions and optimizes traffic flow by sharing data like speed, direction, and road conditions. Then, in August, ZTO deployed 400 autonomous heavy-duty trucks across Chinas highway network, developed jointly with Shanghai-based autonomous driving startup Inceptio Technology and Dongfeng Commercial Vehicle, a subsidiary of Chinas state-owned Dongfeng Motor Group. This marked the largest single delivery of intelligent freight trucks globally at the time, each equipped with light detection and ranging sensors that create 3D maps of surroundings, redundant braking systems, and Inceptio autonomous driving software, a proprietary system designed to optimize long-haul freight efficiency by reducing fuel consumption and human error. The company claims the software has driven 124 million miles, a truly impressive record. The key to this success is Beijings aggressive push to fully automate its logistics sector as part of its ambitious 2030 agenda, a national program aimed at building a modern, harmonious, and creative society, according to the World Bank. Hainan was an experiment in which regulatory agility paved the way for this rapid scaling. The province slashed certification requirements to just 1,864 miles of testing, compared to Chinas most populous provinceGuangdongwhich has a 9,32018,600-mile mandate. Since then, 12 provinces have adopted Hainans fast-track certification model, and Beijing has allocated $1.4 billion to retrofit highways with 5G networks and V2X infrastructure. 5Gs ultralow latency provides near-instant data transmission and it ensures autonomous vehicles can process sensor data and communicate with infrastructure without delays, which is a prerequisite for safe operation at high speeds. ZTOs own proprietary unmanned vehicle management platform, launched a year ago, now monitors a 200 autonomous vehicles fleet across 40 cities, tracking everything from battery levels to pedestrian interactions in real time. An army of ghost trucks and bots And its all scaling up this year. As of April 2025, 27 driverless vehicles operate at the companys Laiwu logistics park in Shandong, south of Beijing. Their routes synced with workers handheld scanners. Government officials in this province confirm plans to deploy at least 1,500 such vehicles across Shandong by late 2025, targeting a 50% reduction in labor costs. This shift is driven by necessity: labor costs in Chinas logistics sector have risen 8% annually since 2022, while e-commerce parcel volumes exceeded 130 billion in 2024. Thats why Beijing is so adamant to make this happen. ZTO is not alone in this. Alibaba’s logistics arm Cainiao claims to have deployed “thousands” of autonomous delivery robots and vehicles during its 2024 Cainiao Smart Global Logistics Summit. Chinese retail giant JDs logistics division has 600 autonomous vehicles in operation, making millions of deliveries. And food delivery titan Meituan has been deploying hundreds of fully driverless delivery vehicles in major urban centers like Beijing and Shenzhen, according to its Q3 2024 earnings call. Neolix has been deploying thousands of its homegrown autonomous vehicles for various commercial delivery applications since 2021. Its a stark contrast with whats happening in the U.S., where theres a patchwork of state- and city-led policies. Companies like Kodiak Robotics and Gatik are testing autonomous trucks for middle-mile delivery, with Gatik operating a small fleet of box trucks for Walmart in Arkansas. However, deployments remain constrained by fragmented state regulations and a lack of centralized infrastructure investment. For example, California requires permits from both the DMV and Public Utilities Commission for commercial autonomous operations, while Texas allows driver-out testing in the state: In May 2024, Pittsburgh-based autonomous truck technology company Aurora Innovation announced that its first commercial trucksdeveloped with Volvoare now driving between Dallas and Houston. The company said that, to date, its self-driving tech has completed 1,200 miles without a driver. Compare that to Inceptio’s 124 million miles. A for smaller vehicles, Waymo Via’s publicly acknowledged deployment of fully driverless delivery vans is likely in the dozens, primarily within pilot programs. Waymo-powered trucks were in trial runs until 2022, but the company stopped its efforts in 2023. Nuro claims it has expanded its autonomous vehicle operations in a handful of cities: Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Houston. Notably, Amazon has not disclosed large-scale deployment numbers for fully driverless road vehicles in commercial operation, and its nutty air delivery system is just not flying as Jeff Bezos probably expected. By 2030, S&P Global Mobility estimates that China will dominate autonomous freight, with 250,000 Level 4 logistics vehicles in operation, compared to 230,000 in the U.S.most of which will remain focused on ride-hailing, not freight. Seems optimistic for the U.S. side. China’s strong push for automated driving, bolstered by significant government support and regulatory frameworks, positions it as a potential leader in the development of autonomous vehicle technology and relative to commercialization of the autonomous vehicle industry, the report says. A centralized strategy, which has resulted in 28,000 miles of roads that are now open for autonomous vehicles with 16,000 licenses issued nationwide. Only time will tell if the U.S. can overtake Beijing, but for now, I can only see a formidable army of Chinese ghost trucks amassing beyond the Great Wall and shaping the future of roads, while we are still playing with cars in geofenced Disneyland rides.
Category:
E-Commerce
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