On Trend And On Time
November 12th was the fifth day of the deadly 2018 Camp Fire, which started in Butte County in Northern California. Two hundred miles down south, San Jose, much like the rest of the Bay Area, was blanketed by particulate matter. The Air Quality Index was in the “Red” unhealthy zone; people were advised to stay indoors.
On days like these, autonomous vehicles and robotic deliveries just make sense. While as of yet there are no driverless Level 4 or Level 5 cars in deployment in California, AxleHire took an important step in that direction by completing its first trial delivery with an autonomous vehicle that Monday, dropping off 21 meal kits from HelloFresh, Sun Basket and Gobble at the doorsteps of San Jose customers.
That hazy morning, boxes of dinner ingredients were loaded onto a 2018 Lincoln MKZ outfitted with high-resolution cameras that provided real-time 360° vision feeding into AutoX’s navigation software. We partnered up with this San Jose-based autonomous vehicle company for our pilot, as we are impressed by AutoX’s ability to deliver a high degree of vehicle autonomy with less expensive hardware than vehicles that rely heavily on LiDAR systems. As this was a Level 3 “Conditional Automation” vehicle, a driver was required to be on board and ready to take over if necessary.
AxleHire’s “Driver” App — we may need to rename this, ha!—performed all the routing, tracking, customer notifications, and photo proofing for this delivery run. Everything was nominal, as they say in rocket launches. Which really means 👍👍👍— we were 100% successful (all the boxes were delivered) and 100% on time (within promised windows), and no kittens were harmed. We’re proud to say that AxleHire was the first U.S. carrier to have successfully delivered packages for customers using an autonomous vehicle.
So that was fun. What were our main takeaways?
📦 Delivery involves parking and waiting, and is not as simple as picking up and dropping off passengers. Level 3 autonomous vehicle delivery is no different.
The biggest carriers incur millions of dollars in parking fines each year. One obvious advantage of fully autonomous vehicles is that they can keep circling around instead of having to double-park while the delivery person is out and about ringing doorbells. The future is not yet come, but we eagerly await the technological breakthroughs and a concomitant shift in the regulatory environment that would make parking tickets a thing of the past. We fully recognize that the proliferation of delivery vehicles has created traffic congestion in urban areas, and municipalities will come down with fines and fees in an attempt to solve these first-world problems — that’s what government does. As innovators in the logistics space, we prefer a multi-pronged approach; that’s why drones and robots are in the pipeline, while at the same time we’re rooting for Level 4 and Level 5 cars to come online.
📦 It is important to preserve the customer experience no matter the mode of delivery.
Convenience and the promise of free and fast delivery are the driving forces behind the boom in e-commerce and last-mile solutions. We can now get almost anything delivered — meals, groceries, laundry, puppies (to and from doggy daycare), alcohol, drugs, reusable diapers. Consumers are conditioned to seeing stuff appear at their doorsteps. While these expectations persist, carriers need to meet them. As long as shippers bear the brunt of the costs of last-mile delivery, customers have little incentive to interrupt their Netflix bingeing to come downstairs to meet a driverless vehicle. So we still need a delivery guy or gal traveling with the car to take those last few steps for an in-person drop-off.
Full vehicle autonomy is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it may make the roads safer and help to bring down transportation costs. On the other hand it renders the driver workforce obsolete. We as a society are co-creating the future and participating in this collective experiment. AxleHire CEO Daniel Sokolovsky offers this observation: “Driver cost is the highest cost of transportation. Automated delivery may help make the driver more efficient, for example by enabling him or her to perform some tasks such as sorting while the vehicle drives itself. Or the driver may be removed completely, which would require customers to come outside, but there’s a different set of challenges in that.” We believe the future has room for different configurations based on different requirements. The best solutions would balance the interests of commerce and the social good of maintaining a productive workforce. We constantly remind ourselves to find that middle ground and avoid swerving towards extremes.
Should shippers jump on the self-driving bandwagon?
When evaluating this as a potential last-mile solution, you must ask yourself one question — is the provider in the carrier business or the autonomous vehicle business? The latter will focus on selling you a one-mode solution based on a singular technology. A carrier will have expertise in routing, the operational scale to bring costs down, and sophisticated integrations with retail, inventory, and fulfillment software. AxleHire is first and foremost a carrier. We will always strive to stay in front of the curve, but we know all too well that bright and shiny may not always be the best. Our priority is to present an optimized solution to our customers by deploying the most cost-effective and efficient combination of transportation modes — old-school trucks and cars, humans, robots, drones, self-driving vehicles — based on the current needs and challenges of the service area. Obviously our answer is biased towards choosing a carrier 😎
What’s more, competing autonomous vehicle companies use somewhat different technology stacks and hardware; some will succeed but many will go the way of the dodo bird and Betamax. It is a carrier’s business to test and experiment with different technologies, and form and dissolve alliances based on what works and what doesn’t. We advise against retailers serving as guinea pigs for any particular upstart technology that claims to have all the bells and whistles. Imagine spending financial and human resources to get systems enmeshed, only to discover three months down the road that there are other newer, better options. Besides, autonomous vehicle technology is just one out of many areas of innovation. Perhaps the Next Big Thing is about making drivers happier.
Choosing AxleHire means you’re working with people who are always up-to-date with the latest and greatest. It will give you bragging rights for engaging a next-gen carrier to make on time and successful deliveries, which is what your customers care about. After all, getting the job done never goes out of style.
❤️ To help support families affected by the Camp Fire, please consider making a donation to the California Community Foundation’s Wildfire Relief Fund. ❤️
Cecilia Tom
Cecilia is passionate about building efficient and resilient systems for the greater good. She is the lead storyteller for AxleHire.
