Amazon Scout vs Cartken Courier in 2026

Amazon Scout

Amazon Scout was Amazon's six-wheeled, cooler-sized autonomous sidewalk delivery robot, and the canonical sidewalk-delivery wind-down datapoint. Launched in January 2019 (first neighborhood in Snohomish County, Washington), it field-tested across four US markets, adding Irvine in Southern California in 2019 and Atlanta and Franklin, Tennessee in 2020.

There is no consumer price, and the program is discontinued: on October 6, 2022 (first reported by Bloomberg), Amazon wound the program down, ending the customer-facing field tests and disbanding the dedicated field-test team while reassigning employees rather than conducting mass layoffs. It is recorded at commercial maturity to reflect its historical peak of live customer field tests, with a discontinued lifecycle state.

It is the canonical sidewalk wind-down alongside FedEx's paused Roxo: a verified-vs-claimed contrast case of a giant's program reaching commercial field-test scale and then being discontinued while survivors such as Starship, Serve, and Coco continued, in the same spirit as the discontinued autonomous-truck legacies Embark and TuSimple. The figure of roughly 400 people who worked on Scout is Amazon's total-program headcount, with the reassignment-versus-exit split not disclosed, and the city-level specifics are partly inherited from launch coverage.

Cartken Courier

Cartken (founded 2019 by ex-Google 'Bookbot' engineers; CEO Christian Bersch) makes the Cartken Courier (Model C), a six-wheeled sidewalk delivery bot (about 44 pounds and 1.5 cubic feet of payload, 3 to 6 mph), and is the hardware-sale-pivot archetype of the cohort, editorially distinct from Starship and Serve: where they operate their own fleets, Cartken pivoted toward selling vehicles to operator partners. Its partners include Mitsubishi, Uber Eats, and Melco, and its lineup adds a larger industrial Hauler (2025; 660 pounds / 300 kg) and an indoor Runner.

It is operator-supervised, not driverless. It has raised about $22.5 million (468 Capital, Magna International, Shell Ventures, Mitsubishi Electric). Cap-flag: the roughly 100 Hauler vehicles cited in the Melco deployment is an aggregator-quoted figure pending direct Cartken or Melco disclosure. As a B2B hardware sale to operator partners, there is no consumer price.