I remember reading as a kid about a guy who had driven his Volkswagen Bug a million miles, enough to drive to the moon and back twice. I remember thinking that’s a lot of miles!
And today, after learning Starship, the company which kicked off the sidewalk robot industry back in 2014, had logged 10 million kilometers (about six million miles, or 12-plus roundtrips to the moon), I thought the same thing: That’s a lot of miles!
Unlike Albert Klein’s 1963 Volkswagen, Starship reached the milestone with a fleet of vehicles, which the company says number two thousand today. Still, it’s an impressive feat, especially compared to self-driving car companies like Waymo and Cruise, each of which Starship says it’s lapped six times.
Starship noted in the announcement that the milestone was reached through more than four million deliveries and that they currently complete 140 thousand road crossings daily.
Since Starship started rolling its robots onto college campuses and towns back in 2016, there’s been several new companies have launched similar products. Uber launched its robot and spun it out as Serve, and Kiwibot started delivering in the Bay area in 2018. Amazon unveiled its Scout sidewalk robot in 2019 but has since scaled back the initiative.
This expansion of the sidewalk delivery space has resulted in several cities debating just how much space should be ceded to the robotic rovers, with some cities banning them while others granting them pedestrian rights.
Through it all, Starship has continued to build out its fleet, and today many of them are delivering goods with little to no human intervention. In fact, according to the company, one robot recently made 24 deliveries in a 16-hour period without any human oversight.
Who knows, at this rate, that productive little robot may make the million-mile club all by itself someday.
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