General Motors’
autonomous car division Cruise is teaming with food-delivery service DoorDash to deliver food using self-driving vehicles.
DoorDash and Cruise plan to test the first food deliveries in San
Francisco in March using autonomous vehicles, according to the announcement.
“We’re kicking off our pilot in San Francisco, a complex and intricate city where Cruise has been
testing vehicles for the past three years,” stated Penn Daniel, special projects operations lead at DoorDash. “To begin, we’ve built a runner system to move orders from the merchant
to the autonomous vehicle. Then, the customer will be notified when the autonomous vehicle is approaching the customer address.”
The test is focused on determining the key technical and
infrastructure challenges with autonomous deliveries, how autonomous delivery can positively impact merchants and customers and whether autonomous vehicles are capable of achieving the same quality
standards as DoorDash without self-driving vehicles, according to the company.
Kroger recently started unmanned deliveries of groceries in Scottsdale, Ariz., in partnership with Nuro and its
self-driving vehicles.