Walmart plans to use driverless cars to deliver orders? How do “driverless” cars deliver orders?

Recently, Walmart and self-driving car startup Gatik have officially launched a service: using driverless cars to deliver customer orders between warehouses, pickup points, and some stores in Bentonville, Arkansas, USA.

As planned, the collaboration between Walmart and Gatik officially began this week, transporting goods between warehouses and stores over a route of at least two miles in Bentonville, filling the critical "middle mile" part of logistics, which, according to Gatik's CEO, "is the most expensive part of the entire corporate supply chain."

The driverless vehicle will work from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day and can deliver up to 10 times. Although there is no driver in the vehicle, there will be a safety driver accompanying it at the beginning to deal with special areas and situations.

This is also the latest achievement in a series of unmanned delivery work carried out by Walmart in recent years.

In addition to reducing logistics costs, Walmart also hopes to use the project to collect data to understand how to better enable driverless cars to incorporate these technologies into future distribution systems, operational processes, and store services.

As early as last year, Walmart partnered with Waymo to allow consumers in the suburbs of Phoenix to submit shopping lists in advance and then take Waymo's driverless vehicles to Walmart stores to pick up their orders directly.

In January this year, after cooperating with Udelv, Walmart began testing an autonomous vehicle called Newton, which can deliver goods ordered online to customers.
This is also the part that consumers are most concerned about - how to deliver goods to their doorsteps using unmanned vehicles.

The self-driving Newton van is equipped with an 8.7-horsepower motor and a 20-kilowatt-hour battery pack, giving it a range of about 60 miles and will travel at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour on urban and suburban roads, including highways.

The truck is equipped with an intelligent cargo system that can be remotely monitored by the operator. It can deliver up to 32 customer orders at a time and can make about 40 deliveries after each full charge.
Consumers can place orders through the application on their mobile phones, and then Walmart will allocate the goods and arrange for the unmanned vehicle to depart. The vehicle will send a notification to people when it arrives at the delivery location.

People can then grab their items from a dedicated compartment in the vehicle in a grocery bag using a code Walmart sends via text message.

With the smooth development of the current cooperation with Gatik, it is a better choice for Walmart in terms of both operating costs and technical progress. After all, although Walmart's e-commerce share in total sales increased by 40% last year, the profit margin of orders fell by 21 basis points.

In terms of technological progress, major retail and e-commerce giants are constantly experimenting with driverless delivery projects in an attempt to solve the "last mile delivery" problem in people's daily consumer lives. CB Insight predicts that more companies will join this battlefield in 2019.

In addition to driverless delivery, Walmart and Amazon have begun to frequently apply for technical patents for drone delivery since last year, totaling nearly 60. It seems that competition in the field of smart delivery will only become more and more fierce.