Nuro And Kroger Deploy Grocery Delivery Self-Driving Cars in Arizona

Nuro is an autonomous vehicle startup which had partnered up with grocery retailer Kroger in June, in order to offer same-day deliveries locally.

Now the partnership announced they are ready to put up the autonomous vehicles on the road in a pilot run that will take place in Scottsdale, Arizona. The customers will be able to shop for groceries and place same or next-day delivery orders via the Kroger website or their mobile app. Though they don’t have a minimum order, they do have a flat delivery fee of $5.95.

The Nuro delivery car has two compartments that can fit up to 6 grocery bags each and the company will use Toyota Prius cars before eventually introducing its own self-driving vehicles. The reason for that is because the Prius shares a lot of similarities with the R1 custom vehicle, hence will help the company improve service and customer experience while they are testing the R1.

They initiated the pilot in order to get feedback from the customers and for the company to better understand what the users might need in the future, and make the necessary adjustments for when the program will go in full.

Throughout the pilot program, Nuro will be looking into how accurate their estimated delivery times actually are, how the regular cars will interact with the self-driving ones as well as how the public will react to the service.