Recently Walmart has announced that they are joining forces with Ford and Postmates in order to fully autonomize grocery delivery. Up to this moment online delivery was already easy, you just waited for someone to deliver your shopping and leave it in your home or even fridge. Technology is developing rapidly, everyone is crazy about having their own autonomous product, it can be a car, a bus or a vacuum cleaner. It is no longer surprising that companies are racing in order to achive that.The newest program presented by Ford, Walmart and Postmates is being tested in Miami.
The main goal of this is to see how customers would interact with autonomous cars, and what advantage they can give to the world of delivering. In my opinion such system has a long way to go before it can be implemented everywhere. The question is how would the car unload your grocery when you’re not at home, it would require help from someone from the delivery service, which already is against the whole purpose of having self-driving cars. Of course now these test deliveries have safety drivers ready to intervine if something goes wrong and they can do the job, but who or what will do it in the future?
We can make assumptions what delivery will look like in the future but we need to remember that is a part of online shopping which according to a recent report done by CNBC will grow very fast. They estimete that by 2025 American consumers will spend up to $100 billion and that is just in grocery. It is fully understandable then why everyone is trying to prepare themselfs in the best possible way to offer the best delivery service. This phenomenon of fully autonomizing every aspect of our lifes is growing faster and faster and this idea of delivering if executed correctly will be part of our life soon on my opinion. Especialy that Ford and Walmart are not the only companies trying to develop self-driving deliveries.
Sources:
https://news.walmart.com/2018/11/14/walmart-and-ford-to-test-grocery-delivery-with-self-driving-cars