Driverless cars start delivering groceries

ARIZONA (AP) — The nation’s largest grocery chain stepped into the driverless delivery market Tuesday, bringing milk, eggs and other items to a customer’s home in a vehicle with nobody at the wheel.

Although limited to delivering within about 1.5 kilometers of one Arizona supermarket owned by Kroger Co., it represents the latest step for industries trying to lower delivery costs of everyday items and those trying to launch self-driving cars on public roads.

Tuesday’s delivery arrived at Shannon Baggett’s house in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale. She was already receiving groceries weekly from larger, manned self-driving vehicles that the company Nuro developed and launched in August. She said it was surreal to see nobody in the car bringing her milk, eggs and strawberries.

”It was very cool to see it pull up. It was a lot smaller than I thought it would be,” Baggett said. “I told my husband, ‘We just got our groceries delivered by a robot.’”

But Tuesday’s launch also highlighted some of the many challenges still ahead for autonomous vehicles: one of the compact cars didn’t drive as planned at a media demonstration because of a dead battery and had to be pushed up a ramp and onto a truck by several men.

Kroger and Nuro, which are based in Mountain View, California, announced Tuesday that they would deliver groceries in the Scottsdale area, using an autonomous vehicle called the R1, which has no steering wheel and no seats for people.

Nuro will be adding two of its completely unmanned R1 vehicles to its fleet of manned self-driving vehicles that deliver groceries, said Dave Ferguson, president and co-founder of Nuro.

When summoned, the R1 will travel within a 1.5-kilometer radius of the Fry’s Food store just east of the Phoenix Zoo at speeds up to 25 40 kilometers per hour) on residential roads but stay clear of main roads or highways, according to Pam Giannonatti, corporate affairs manager at Cincinnati-based Kroger’s Fry’s division.

Customers place an order on their smartphone or laptop and get a text message when the groceries are on their way. Another message will alert them when the delivery is curbside. Once the vehicle arrives, the customer will receive a code to punch in to open the doors, Giannonatti said.