Self-driving vehicles will change the way we shop for groceries
Summary
Tech companies and traditional car makers are heavily investing in self-driving technology.
Grocery retailers hope to improve delivery services with fast and cheap self-driving vehicles.
Kruger, Nuro, and Ford are just a few of the many companies testing self-driving vehicles in US cities.
Professional drivers could lose their jobs when delivery vehicles become fully driverless.
Self-driving tech is set to disrupt traditional car makers, public transportation systems, parking facility operators, and many more sectors.
Self-driving cars aren’t just one of Elon Musk’s fantasies. Yes, self-driving is one of the cool features Tesla offers, but this tech is being developed by a number of other, perhaps lower-profile, companies right now. And it’s not only about cars: self-driving systems threaten to change the way trucks, taxis, and even delivery vans operate. Loup Ventures, a venture capital firm, estimates that by mid-century, “95 per cent of [the] new vehicles sold, or 96.3 million cars, will be fully autonomous.” This $3.6 trillion market will transform the way companies operate and consumers shop, turning up the temperature on late adopters.
One of the industries already feeling the heat is retail.
Autonomous delivery vehicles
When you imagine online retail, Amazon probably springs to mind. But increasingly, you should think of your grocery store – at least a digital, 21st century version of it. In fact, a study released by the Food Marketing Institute and Nielsen suggests that “in as few as five-seven years, 70 per cent of consumers will be grocery shopping online.” And as this market is set to be worth around $100 billion by 2022 or 2024, the race has already begun to use self-driving tech to deliver these goods faster.
The idea is simple: deliver the right order of groceries to a customer’s doorstep on time. If customers are unsure what to order, drive the mobile shop to their homes and let them choose. The key challenge is to develop self-driving delivery vehicles able to navigate through busy streets and sharp corners. Furthermore, this service needs to be safer, cheaper, and faster than alternatives such as taxi, vans, public transport, or even private cars. If companies develop – and the authorities approve – new types of delivery vehicles, it will change much more than online grocery sales. It might revolutionise the delivery of a whole array of products.
However, the first step is to move vehicles from quiet labs to busy roads.
It's all about testing, testing, testing
Scottsdale, Arizona, is one of the very first cities in the US in which a fleet of self-driving cars delivers groceries to online customers. The test project is the result of a partnership between the retail giant Kroger and a Silicon Valley robotics startup called Nuro. While the initial orders will be delivered by Toyota’s self-driving vehicles with a safety driver at the ready, the plan is to eventually use the R1 car bot, Nuro’s autonomous delivery vehicle. In this test phase, customers can only order from a single Kroger store. The delivery of goods, whether same-day or the day after, comes with a $5.95 fee.
Far from Arizona’s deserts, Ford is testing its own self-driving tech in Miami. The car giant teamed up with the delivery platform Postmates and the AI company Argo to test the performance of its vehicles in a meal delivery role. The aim is to explore how consumers and other companies behave with driverless vehicles. In this case, there’s a driver behind tinted windows – people just don’t know it! As Ford’s Alexandra Ford English writes, “This is our first self-driving research vehicle modified specifically to test a variety of interfaces - the touch screen, the locker system, the external audio system - to inform the design of our purpose-built self-driving vehicle that’s scheduled to arrive in 2021.”
While Ford, Nuro, and Kroger’s plans are ambitious, these companies are just a small part of a huge initiative. Giants such as Volvo, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, General Motors, Renault-Nissan, Uber, Waymo, Tesla, and many others are also competing in the self-driving vehicles market.
But the rules of the game will be set by the lawmakers.
Laws and drones
The SELF DRIVE Act was passed by the US House of Representatives on September 6, 2017. This bill laid the groundwork for the development of self-driving vehicles, regulating their safety standards, certifications, and many other details. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will be authorised to remove unsafe vehicles from the road. However, the law is stuck in the Senate as some lawmakers doubt the safety of the technology.
Lawmakers haven’t yet agreed on the regulation of self-driving vehicles, but Amazon doesn’t want to wait. The company is testing drones as a product delivery tool and has recently patented tech that allows drones to hitch a ride on trucks when travelling long distances. In addition to this, Bezos’ empire already owns a patent on a drone system that recognises human gestures and voice commands. These are incredible advances, but they’re not good for everyone. And as the list of self-driving vehicles keeps getting bigger, so does the list of losers.
Losers of the revolution
The first group haunted by the future of self-driving delivery vehicles are professional drivers, who wonder what’ll happen to their jobs. But the impact of self-driving vehicles will be much larger. The tech companies launching their own driverless cars will eat into the market share of traditional car makers. Also, Alain L. Kornhauser, an autonomous vehicles researcher at Princeton University, predicts that “The biggest impact is going to be on parking. We aren’t going to need it, definitely not in the places we have it now.” And this means that authorities and operators will have to find a new use for empty parking lots. Finally, even the public transportation system might feel the pressure as self-driving vehicles projects compete for limited public funds.
Consumers are the ultimate winners
Self-driving systems might be a technological change on the scale of the automobile, and that could leave entire industries in the position of wagon-makers, farriers, and saddlers. But for consumers, the benefits could be incredible.
Retail will be forced to change, but these new delivery options will offer exciting possibilities for the grocery industry. As customers increasingly buy online, once sluggish delivery service will be replaced by self-driving vehicles. And if Silicon Valley startups and traditional car makers deliver as promised, the future of the grocery industry might rival Amazon’s.
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Meaning of trend
The upcoming revolution in the transportation sector caused by self-driving tech can’t be ignored. It will impact both ordinary citizens and businesses alike, and if the pioneers of this initiative fulfil their promises, we can expect faster and cheaper product delivery. Although professional drivers and several industries will be disrupted by autonomous vehicles, consumers will be the ultimate winners.
Expert Opinion
"The battery of a vehicle is a huge component of cost. R1 will have a modular battery pack, which will be able to be customized for the amount of time the vehicle is on the road,” says Nuro’s CEO, Jiajun Zhu.
As Alain L. Kornhauser, a researcher in autonomous vehicles at Princeton University, notes, “The biggest impact is going to be on parking. We aren’t going to need it, definitely not in the places we have it now. Having parking wedded or close to where people spend time, that’s going to be a thing of the past. If I go to a football game, my car doesn’t need to stay with me. If I’m at the office, it doesn’t need to be there. The current shopping center with the sea of parking around it, that’s dead.”
This article was originally published in 2018 on Diynxt.com.