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Self-Driving Delivery Vans Will Be Tested In Japan Next Year, Won't Climb Stairs

Delivery services seem to be the next targets for autonomous vehicle development.
Parcel ready for delivery 2 photos
Photo: George Hodan
Toyota QD200 delivery vehicle for Yamato
Two Japanese companies have announced their intentions of developing and deploying autonomous parcel delivery vehicles on public roads. We are writing about Yamato Transport and DeNA, a pair of companies that have signed a partnership to conduct field trials of a package delivery service without any human drivers.

According to Nikkei, the first public tests will be carried out starting March 2017, and authorities have allowed them to perform one year of testing. If this is successful, Japanese customers will eventually be able to order things and receive them without a driver being present in their delivery van.

The two companies are not the first in the world to consider this, as Google and Amazon have both expressed wishes and intentions in using autonomous technology to speed up delivery solutions.

The Yamato delivery service has recorded a 50% increase in volume in the past decade, and the company transported over 1.7 billion packages in the fiscal year 2015.

The Japanese company explains the phenomenal growth thanks to online shopping, but it also has suffered from a small increase in operating profit in the same period because of higher labor costs, as well as lower delivery fees negotiated to stay competitive.

Yamato teamed up with DeNA, a mobile portal with a platform for smartphone games, which is ready to invest in the field of autonomous vehicles. Together, they will develop autonomous delivery vehicles, which have the goal of lowering the cost of each delivery and saving billions for the company.

If the plan works out, the parcel transport firm will not ditch human staff, as they would still perform early morning and late-night shifts for customer convenience. The first tests will be carried out in government-designed zones, where self-driving vehicles are allowed on public roads.

The first autonomous delivery vans will have a driver behind the wheel, ready to step in in case something goes wrong. The trial will use actual customers, which will direct the vehicles to the precise location of the delivery using a dedicated app.

Once these tests are completed, a shopping function will be available for testing. The driverless car will pick up products from various stores and deliver them to a customer’s door.

According to Yamato, this will also require the aid of store clerks, which will have to place the items in boxes, and customers will have to go outside to receive the packages when the self-driving delivery van arrives.

This sound extraordinarily fun and innovative, until you have to leave your house to get groceries, right?
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About the author: Sebastian Toma
Sebastian Toma profile photo

Sebastian's love for cars began at a young age. Little did he know that a career would emerge from this passion (and that it would not, sadly, involve being a professional racecar driver). In over fourteen years, he got behind the wheel of several hundred vehicles and in the offices of the most important car publications in his homeland.
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