I got another email from Amazon this past week telling me, once again, that there is a delay in delivering the AWS DeepRacer. Here’s the gist of the email:

We know you are eager to get your hands on your own AWS DeepRacer car. However, we remain behind in our goal to put these fully-autonomous, machine learning-powered cars into customers’ hands. As part of preparing for retail availability, we implemented a new and improved car battery design, but it’s turned out to be harder than we thought to get all of the required certifications. We believe we’re finally on a path to achieving what we desire, but we anticipate it’ll take until sometime in the Fall before these new devices will be ready to ship. As part of this delay, you may have noticed that we changed the product status to “email me when available” on the Amazon.com DeepRacer detail page. Rest assured, your pre-order is unaffected, and you are at the top of the list when we’re ready to ship the device. We’ll update the Amazon.com status as soon as we have an availability date to share.

I looked back on the order page, and down at the bottom, where they have questions and answers, I discovered I would have had one already if I’d attended the re:Invent 2018, back last December. Sucks to be me I guess. I haven’t seen anything this bad since I participated in buying a TravelWide camera via Kickstarter. I can understand the Kickstarter project, as this was being run buy a few passionate photographers. And they were honest and communicative as to what and why they were delayed.

Amazon, however, has absolutely no excuse. If the owner can spend $1B a year so he can send his rockets to the edge of space, if Amazon can run a multi-tentacled world-wide technological empire, then somebody who is a mere minion for Amazon can get their shit together on the design and ship the product. I placed my order the last day of 2018. It shouldn’t have taken this long to build out more.