Walmart to test self-driving car deliveries with GM’s Cruise

Starting next year, some of Walmart’s grocery deliveries and other items will be dropped off at customers’ homes by a small fleet of driverless electric cars.

The big box retailer said on Tuesday it would launch a new pilot with Cruise, an autonomous, fully electric vehicle company that is a majority-owned subsidiary of General Motors. He did not disclose the terms of the deal.

Tom Ward, senior vice president of customer product at Walmart US, said customers who live near the Driver in Scottsdale, Ariz. Can place an order at their local store and have it delivered by one of Cruise’s cars. . He said this could advance two of the retailer’s goals: getting customers what they need quickly and moving closer to the company’s goal of zero emissions by 2040.

“Technology that has the potential not only to save customers time and money, but also to benefit the planet is a technology we want to know more about,” he said in an article on the company’s website.

The retail giant has experimented with different technological ways to alleviate inefficient or costly aspects of its business, from simplifying shelf replenishment to speeding up same-day deliveries to customers. One area of ​​interest is solutions for the last mile – the term used to describe the last part of a package’s journey that carries a large portion of its delivery costs.

Walmart has tests underway with six different autonomous vehicle companies, including Cruise, Ford and Waymo, owned by Alphabet. It is also testing drone delivery with several operators, including a company that delivers Covid-19 test kits to homes.

Other retailers, including Kroger, are also testing driverless vehicle deliveries.

However, not all of Walmart’s tech experiments developed. The company recently ended a contract with a robotics company, Bossa Nova Robotics, after deciding that humans could do similar work to robots used in some stores to scan shelves for inventory purposes.

At the end of October, the retailer announced it would designate four stores as e-commerce labs where employees would test new digital tools. For example, they’ll be testing an app that uses augmented reality to scan multiple boxes in the backroom rather than one at a time when they move them to the store.