How Driverless Cars Will Impact Cities
Kroger Co. is about to test whether it can drive supermarket customers away from crowded grocery aisles with a fleet of diminutive driverless cars designed to lower delivery costs.
The test program could make Kroger the first US grocer to make deliveries with robotic cars that won’t have a human riding along to take control in the event something out of the ordinary occurs.
Cincinnati-based Kroger is partnering with Nuro, a Silicon Valley startup founded two years ago by two engineers who worked on self-driving cars at Google. That Google project is now known as Waymo, which plans to introduce a ride-hailing service that is supposed to begin picking up passengers in fully autonomous cars by the end of this year.
The exact location and launch date of the delivery service not yet been determined.
