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Willing to collect your parcels or pizza from a driving robot?

Victoria Dmochowski

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CIPD Staff

14 Mar, 2018 11:47

Bloomberg have written an article about how driverless technology is going to transform commerce. Toyota, Renault-Nissan, Deutsche Post and Amazon are all experimenting with driverless delivery. Ford have even piloted driverless pizza deliveries in Miami! (Which might not be good news for gig economy workers like Deliveroo drivers.)

Current thinking is that the vehicle will contact a shopper to tell them to collect their delivery roadside by entering a code on a touchpad attached to the vehicle. Ford is testing the willingness of customers to leave their home and collect their package from the vehicle.

One way humans may still be involved in short haul deliveries is by grabbing packages and making deliveries through a neighbourhood while the van drives itself and follows along.

Would you be willing to collect your parcels curbside? Or would you miss the human interaction at your door? Would this mark a massive change for our logistics industry? 

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  • Keith

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    19 Mar, 2018 10:24

    Of course I would be willing to collect from a roadside vehicle if it were at a convenient time for me. The human interaction is minimal. The key for most is convenience rather than anything else.
  • Joanne O'Hagan

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    19 Mar, 2018 10:50

    I'd be more than happy to collect at the kerb, there is really not any human interaction - the drivers are on such a tight schedule that they want to get to their next delivery asap - which is a whole other conversation.

    If there is a shortage of delivery drivers, and gridlocked traffic then we are creating new roles in people needed to manage the bots and taking a little bit of extra traffic off the roads - putting it on the footpath may create other issues if it becomes ubiquitous but I'm happy to see how things progress.
  • Ray

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    19 Mar, 2018 10:54

    In reply to Joanne O'Hagan:

    Fine by me - but I suspect many older people living in remote rural locations actually enjoy the interaction when a local delivery person brings something she has ordered. This is the case for my 83 year-old mother in law who lives in a national park about 8 miles away from the nearest village

  • Keith

    | 0 Posts

    19 Mar, 2018 10:57

    In reply to Ray:

    Sadly then in future such people will probably have to pay a premium for a "human" delivery .

    It amazes me how quickly we have all moved to self scanning in supermarkets - fifteen years ago we would have said this would not be acceptable....