Driverless cars for grocery delivery announced by Kroger in the US

ABU DHABI: Kroger and Nuro announced their partnership to work on driverless cars for grocery services earlier this year. Kroger, America’s largest supermarket retailer, and Nuro, manufacturer of the world’s first driverless delivery vehicle, have confirmed that they are experimenting on grocery delivery with the help of Nuro’s robots.

They have announced that their first driverless delivery vehicle will be primarily launched in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Scottsdale’s Mayor, Jim Lane said, “Scottsdale is proud to be the home of Kroger and Nuro’s partnership. We welcome innovative technology that can benefit the lives of Scottsdale residents. We feel the partnership holds tremendous potential and promise, and offers our residents real, not-yet-experienced convenience for everyday routines.”

Kroger’s Chief Digital Officer, Yael Cosset stated, “We’re excited to launch our autonomous vehicle delivery pilot with Fry’s in Scottsdale. Kroger wants to bring more customers the convenience of affordable grocery delivery, and our pilot with Nuro will help us test and learn to understand customer acceptance of autonomous vehicles in our seamless offering.”

Nuro’s CEO Dave Ferguson said, “We’re proud to contribute and turn our vision for local commerce into a real, accessible service that residents of Scottsdale can use immediately”. He also added, “Our goal is to save people time, while operating safely and learning how we can further improve the experience.”

Nuro aims at its self-driving technology in such a way that benefits the people for the delivery of local goods and services. That could be anything like groceries, dry cleaning, and the work which is within the boundaries of the city. This technology of Nuro consists of two sections that will have a capacity of six grocery bags each.

However, in Scottsdale, before introducing custom self-driving vehicles, Nuro will first employ Toyota Prius Cars. The reason behind this is that the main aim of pilot is to learn, and using the Prius self-driving fleets can actually help to speed up the learnings.
Nuro says that through their idea of the pilot program, they just want to get public feedback and reactions to see how their self-driving technology collaborates with regular and basic cars and how they work at estimated delivery times.