Reply to post: Re: Overloading

Amazon deploys AI cameras inside delivery vans, misspells 'surveillance' as 'safety' in reason why

ChrisC Silver badge

Re: Overloading

Full disclosure time - the OH delivers for another company, and uses her own car, as do many of the other drivers at her depot, so the following comments are based on what I've learned as a result...

BYOC(ar) is common across many delivery companies, and is one of the reasons why you can now order something today and have it in your hands tomorrow without it costing a fortune in delivery charges, or why you can wait an extra couple of days and have it delivered for nothing - if companies required their drivers to only use vans, then it'd either result in there being fewer drivers (pushing up delivery times) or drivers having to be provided with company vans (pushing up delivery costs), because many of the drivers doing this work day in day out are doing it as a way to earn a bit of money doing a job that's sufficiently flexible to fit around things like childcare, and wouldn't be doing it if they had to provide their own van.

Maybe the rules are different in your part of the world, but here in the UK it's not illegal to fill up the interior of a car so much that you can't see out the rear window provided you have a clear view of both wing mirrors, though yes, if you pile it high with smaller items that could shift around under braking then there is the potential for things to go wrong - this isn't in itself a problem with using cars for delivery, it's just something the driver needs to plan when loading the car to keep things as well secured as possible.

Overloading, as far as weight limits go, is unlikely given the makeup of a typical car-load of parcels, especially bearing in mind that it'll usually only be the driver in the car with them all, rather than potentially 4-6 other fully grown adults. Plus, at the company my OH works for, the genuinely heavy or bulky items are assigned to one of the van drivers for delivery, with the car drivers being used to cope with the far greater numbers of smaller/lighter parcels. And the drivers have the choice to reject any parcel they decide is too big/heavy for them to delivery safely.

So I wouldn't say these "amateur" drivers (and note that they're amateurs in the same sense as anyone driving a fully liveried van for delivering - with few exceptions, those vans can be driven by anyone with a normal car licence, so those drivers are unlikely to have had any additional training compared with the people using their own cars) are in general ignoring the laws, and right now it's the way most deliveries are going. Even the big names are increasingly using drivers who bring their own vans to help deal with the amount of stuff that's now being delivered every day, so if you'd prefer not to order stuff from a company that relies on such drivers to get said stuff to you, then you're going to end up with a rather short list of suppliers.

As for the whole "in cab camera" and wider "driver behaviour monitoring" issue - prior to doing deliveries, the OH drove buses, and cameras/black boxes were a standard fit on all the buses in this part of the UK, along with "mystery shopper" passengers who'd observe driver performance first hand. Doesn't necessarily make such levels of employee scrutiny OK, it's just worth remembering that Amazon aren't the first, and won't be the last, company to do stuff like this - we do however seem to like giving them more of a hard time over stuff like this, because, well, Amazon.

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