Walmart, Ford and Argo AI team up to launch autonomous delivery service in the US

According to foreign media reports, Walmart announced plans to cooperate with Ford Motor Company and its autonomous vehicle company Argo AI to provide autonomous vehicle delivery services.

The partnership will use Ford Escape hybrid SUVs equipped with Argo AI technology, and the service is expected to be initially piloted in three cities in the United States: Miami, Austin, Texas, and Washington, D.C. It is planned to expand the scale of testing over time. The service is expected to be launched in the fourth quarter of this year.

The project content of this cooperation is to allow Walmart customers to order groceries and other items online, and then have them delivered by self-driving cars to their homes.

Tom Ward, Walmart’s senior vice president of last-mile delivery in the U.S., said: “We are excited to work with Argo and Ford. This collaboration will further our mission to deliver products to customers’ homes with unparalleled speed and convenience, and on the other hand, will continue to pave the way for autonomous delivery technology.”

In the past few years, Ford has also maintained a partnership with Walmart to provide a pilot project for groceries for the world's largest retailer. In November 2018, Ford and the courier company Postmates implemented a plan to explore how self-driving cars can improve Walmart's existing delivery services. This cooperation is an expansion of the delivery service.

Argo AI CEO and co-founder Bryan Salesky also expressed the hope that through this collaboration, he could demonstrate that self-driving cars are capable of delivering goods to customers’ homes on a large scale.

Physical retailers like Walmart have been constantly looking for new ways to meet customer expectations in recent years in order to better compete with e-commerce giant Amazon. For example, a year ago, Walmart launched the membership program "Walmart + " to meet users' needs for online ordering.

Especially in the current situation where the global epidemic has not yet ended, the three parties have cooperated to launch an automatic delivery service. On the one hand, it can stimulate customers to order goods online to a certain extent, realize one-click ordering, and deliver them to their doorsteps; on the other hand, it can also reduce the chances of going out and contacting people. Such autonomous driving delivery projects are also expected to become one of the service methods favored by people in the future.

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