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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

driverless delivery

Uber Eats and Motional to Provide Driverless Food Delivery in 2022

Food delivery platform Uber Eats and driverless technology company Motional announced last week that they are partnering to pilot autonomous food deliveries. The companies plan to launch this service in Santa Monica, California, in early 2022.

The delivery vehicle provided and operated by Motional, a joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and Aptiv, is the fully electric Hyundai IONIQ 5-based robotaxi. The scope of the autonomous delivery service will be small to start; the electric vehicles will only deliver curated meal kits from select restaurants in Santa Monica on Uber Eats.

The design of Uber Eats drone in 2019.

Although this is Uber Eat’s first attempt at developing driverless car delivery, the company actually experimented with drone delivery in 2019. The design, which included six rotors, was unveiled at the Forbes Under 30 Summit with the intention of testing it out in San Diego in 2020. The drone could apparently carry a dinner for two and had a round trip range of 12 miles. However, since the announcement in 2019, we haven’t heard any other news about the delivery drones.

Uber Eats is certainly not the only company that has taken a stab at autonomous food delivery. In 2018, Postmates (which was acquired by Uber Eats) introduced Postmates Serve, an autonomous sidewalk delivery robot and associated food delivery service platform, which has been running pilot trials in Hollywood. During summer 2021, Grubhub and Yandex announced that they would be bringing food delivery robots to college campuses. Earlier this month, 7-Eleven and Nuro announced a partnership to pilot autonomous food deliveries in Mountain View, California.

Autonomous delivery offers several benefits, including reduced delivery fees for customers and restaurants and minimal human contact. Third-party delivery services were in high demand after the start of the pandemic, and seeing that we are still not out of it, food delivery will likely continue to be a popular choice for customers staying home.

As cool as driverless and drone delivery sounds, there has yet to be a company that has really put its concept into action, especially on a large scale. Several companies have now had the chance to pilot their concepts for a few months to a few years, so maybe, 2022 will be the year we see a wider implementation of this tech.

Nuro’s Driverless Delivery Vehicles Get Approval to Run on California Roads

Nuro announced today that it has been given permission to operate its driverless delivery vehicles on California’s public roads.

The Nuro R2 is a pod-like, low-speed autonomous vehicle about half the size of a normal car that only travels up to 25 mph. It features two cargo compartments and no area for a human driver or passenger.

Nuro has been on a bit of a regulatory roll this year. In February, the R2 got federal approval to operate on public roads.

But the world is a vastly different place today than it was back in February. With a global pandemic raging across the country and planet, the idea of a humanless means of delivering food seems pretty enticing right now. With trips to the grocery store now constituting a risk of contracting COVID-19, there has been a surge in grocery e-commerce. Instacart and other delivery service have instituted no-contact delivery and arm their workers with gloves and masks. Still, having a robot drive your groceries curbside removes another vector of human-to-human transmission.

It will be awhile before autonomous delivery vehicles like Nuro’s move into the mainstream, though. Previously, Nuro partnered with Walmart and Domino’s Pizza for autonomous delivery in Houston, TX. Given the shelter-in-place orders in California, there is no set timeline for Nuro’s R2 tests to begin other than “soon.” When it does, it will start in Mountain View, before rolling out to Santa Clara and San Mateo counties and eventually the whole state.

Even then, however, Nuro is going to have to work with local governments who are grappling with rapid technological change in real time, let alone a time of pandemic. Hopefully we won’t have to experience another global health crisis like this one in our lifetime. If we do, though, it would be nice to have more autonomous vehicles allowed to take over jobs that are vital, yet suddenly more dangerous, like food delivery.