Won’t be around to accept a package? If the order’s from Amazon, you needn’t stress. Months after it began making deliveries to the trunks of GM and Cadillac vehicles in 37 cities via Key In-Car, the Seattle company is teaming up with Ford to bring the service to the automaker’s cars.
Owners of 2017-and-newer Ford and Lincoln models — those equipped with wireless modems — can schedule Amazon Prime orders to be delivered directly to their vehicles after linking the FordPass or LincolnWay apps to their Amazon accounts. Deliveries can be scheduled, rescheduled, or redirected to a brick-and-mortar address day-of, and Ford notes that delivery drivers are required to double-check the door handle before departing to make sure it’s locked.
“There are reports that 30 percent of Americans living in houses or townhomes have been victims of package theft. So, it’s easy to get anxious about your deliveries when you aren’t home to receive them,” wrote FordPass ecosystem business leader Lorin Kennedy in a blog post. “It’s a convenient, secure way to ensure your packages are delivered directly to you when you are out for the day, anticipating bad weather or just battling paranoia.”
In a somewhat related announcement, Ford said that it’ll soon make available through FordPass and LincolnWay on-demand carwash and detailing services from Spiffy, Rub A Dub, and Sparkl. (Like Amazon deliverypeople, car washers can unlock and lock vehicle doors to clean the interior.) Sparkl launched on-demand carwashing in the Chicago metro area earlier this year, with Spiffy and Rub A Dub to follow in the coming months.
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Just last week, Amazon expanded Key for Garage — a keyless delivery option that allows couriers to drop off packages in carports when residents aren’t around — to a host of new U.S. cities, including Charlotte, North Carolina; Columbus, Ohio; Fresno, California; Las Vegas, Nevada; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and Virginia Beach, Virginia. And in January, it announced that Key by Amazon — which allows those same couriers to leave packages inside of homes — would work with new third-party smart locks like Schlage’s Encode Smart Wi-Fi Deadbolt.
Chamberlain’s MyQ and LiftMaster connected garage door openers were the first to support Key for Garage. Customers can open and close doors via the Key app or monitor their statuses to ensure they close post-delivery.
On the commercial side of the equation, there’s Key for Business, a fob for delivery drivers that enables keyless entry to offices and corporate properties. Building managers and landlords can give controlled access to drivers and monitor entries or impose limits on delivery hours, and Amazon says it works with most building access systems.
Currently, Key for Business is available to “hundreds” of buildings across the U.S., including apartments owned by WinnCompanies, Avalon, and Kettler. It builds on Hub, a delivery solution Amazon launched in June 2018 with properties owned by Fairfield Residential, Pinnacle, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Equity Residential, and others.
At the time, Amazon said that more than 500,000 customers in New York, San Francisco, and across the country had access to Hub, which recruits on-site property staff to sign for shipments from Amazon and other shops and websites.
