A recent report showed that Americans are still skeptical, and perhaps even scared, about the idea of being a passenger in a driverless car. That's probably easy to understand, but it means autonomous vehicles with no passengers and no driver are likely to be the first driverless models that are actually going to be employed on our roads doing real jobs that benefit us all. And that's good news for a startup company called Nuro, which now claims to have enough investment to launch its own self-driving delivery vehicle.
Of course, there's a whole army of automakers, shippers and little-known companies out there working on such vehicles, so the first to make this vision of the future a reality really will have a huge advantage going forward.
Nuro is a company that has been founded by two engineers who formerly worked on Google's self-driving vehicle project, Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu. Choosing to look beyond the ferocious race for self-driving passenger cars, they decided instead to focus on goods delivery, which the company unsurprisingly says is easier to solve and will be quicker to bring to market.
The vehicle Nuro has come up with is about half the width of an average sedan car, it looks like a very small minivan, and it therefore takes up a lot less room on the road than a traditional car. Of course, it doesn't have to be big as it doesn't need space for people, and Nuro says that means it will be safer on the road when it's coming into contact with pedestrians who are collecting their purchases from it.
There are compartments built into its sides that are capable of carrying around 10 shopping bags, but can also be configured to accommodate a wide variety of applications such as lockers, shelves, heating or cooling elements, and any number of other storage systems.
After 18 months of development, the company says the $92 million investment it's secured will allow it to have the vehicle in limited service by the end of 2018. At the moment, Nuro is in talks with retailers both large and small, as well as with potential partners who could manufacture the vehicle in suitably big numbers. It will be interesting to see if any big names come forward to embrace it as early adopters in the same way as they have with Tesla's electric semi-articulated EV truck.
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