• by Chuck Martin , July 26, 2018

Walmart is starting a pilot program using Waymo self-driving cars to transport shoppers to and from grocery pickup locations.

The trial will run out of a Walmart store in Chandler, Arizona, and be limited to a group within Wymo’s 400 daily users, called “early riders,” according to a blog post by Tom Ward, vice president, digital operations, at Walmart.

The cars of Waymo, which started as Google’s self-driving car project, have driven more than 8 million miles on roads across 25 U.S. cities.

For the Arizona project, shoppers will place an online grocery pickup order at Walmart’s website.

“Our personal shoppers get to work picking customers’ orders based on their pickup times,” stated Ward. “Waymo does the rest. They transport customers to and from pickup, and all the while, those customers can text, nap, work… you name it.”

The goal of the pilot is to learn, with a focus on making Walmart’s online grocery pickup more convenient, according to Ward.