With the COVID-19 lockdown still in force in most parts of the country, Americans remain shut up in their homes, Zooming their work or school and waiting for signs of relief. Quarantining doesn’t make much sense, however, if they still run out to the market to buy food and supplies. That’s why many consumers have turned to online stores that can deliver right to their door. Families stock up on food and household staples, including toilet paper and hand sanitizer when they can find those precious commodities.
One thing that’s almost certain is that when autonomous vehicles do first appear in significant numbers, they’ll be delivery vans. That’s because carrying packages rather than humans greatly reduces the risk posed by self-driving vehicles. If an order of Dr. Bronner’s castile soap gets crushed in a fender bender, that’s unfortunate, but not a tragedy. In an accident, the vans will be programmed to sacrifice themselves to avoid harm to pedestrians, bicyclists or drivers of other vehicles. In other words, they’ll crash into a tree rather than collide with a pedestrian or other car.
Also favoring delivery vans in this first-mover role is that, for the most part, they have predictable routes and therefore can more easily learn the ins and outs of complex cityscapes—reducing the chance of navigation errors and accidents. A number of innovative companies, working with big retailers, are already running pilot programs with autonomous delivery vans. On January 30, 2018, the Silicon Valley start-up Udelv made what it claims to have been the first self-driving delivery for Draeger’s Market in San Mateo, California.
The basic concept is that a customer uses a smart app to request a delivery for a certain window of time. Much as Uber does, the app can track the location of the vehicle as it makes its way toward its destination. When the van rolls up to the home, it texts the customer a code and a notice that the package—whether it is groceries, dry cleaning or prescription drugs—has arrived. The person walks up to the van and punches the code into a screen on the side of the vehicle that pops open a door to a storage compartment. Once the package has been retrieved, the door closes and the van drives to the next destination.
Drones have many positive attributes. Theoretically, they emit less greenhouse gas than gasoline-powered delivery trucks, and they can reach remote areas to deliver crucial medicines. They can help monitor utility lines and bring crucial supplies to disaster areas. They can also be used to bring consumers in rural areas more choice at better prices. In China, online retailer JD.com has used a drone to cut the delivery time to a remote mountain village from days to minutes, while slicing the cost dramatically.
The bigger worry is noise. A 2017 NASA study found that heavy road traffic in residential areas is much less annoying than the back-and-forth high-pitched buzz of drones. When Alphabet’s Wing division started using drones to deliver hot coffee and food in three minutes or less to customers in the Australian suburb of Bonython, Canberra, the buzzing didn’t go over well. Jane Gillespie, a local resident and a member of Bonython Against Drones (BAD), says the drone’s loud, high-pitched whirrs sound like a “Formula One racing car.”
Whether it’s a drone, a Scout delivery bot or a full-sized autonomous delivery van, autonomous delivery conveyances make more economic sense than human drivers. That means the future lies in self-driving delivery vehicles, and people will need to get used to them plying the streets. At first, these machines will make for some bizarre encounters. In a pilot program in Ann Arbor, Michigan, an autonomous Ford Fusion hybrid was used to deliver Domino’s pizza to the front doors of suburban homes. After getting their pizza, some customers, caught on videotape, would say “Thank you” to the car.
It’s hard to understand why anyone would do this. Perhaps they were afraid that when our robot overlords take over, the first thing they’ll do is check the old log files to see who was nice to the robots and who wasn’t.
→ Adapted from Bezonomics by Brian Dumaine, published by Scribner.
