In recent years, autonomous vehicles with wheels have gained prominence in an increasingly complex last urban mile due to the pressure of electronic commerce. They work well in pacified areas, campuses or residential areas, with short and repetitive routes, and that is why they are one of the solutions for the final stretch of the distribution. When there is traffic, the routes change constantly or deliveries are complicated, they are no longer viable.
These are small vehicles without a driver that circulate on sidewalks and make direct deliveries to the customer in short distances. Its logic is simple: moving orders from a nearby point - a store, a restaurant or microhubs, which are small distribution centers within the city - to the final customer, on predictable routes and with few unforeseen events.
A good example is Vaive Logistics, a company that emerged from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. The company, in the pre-commercial phase, works with a leasing model: it is not responsible for the distribution, but puts the vehicles at the disposal of logistics operators.
There are initiatives that already have their vehicles on the streets, such as Starship Technologies, founded in Estonia in 2014 by the creators of Skype, based in San Francisco and which has already exceeded 9 million deliveries in several countries. Its model focuses on local orders – food, daily purchases or shipments on university campuses – especially in the United States.
In Europe, vehicles developed by Starship Technologies are used for the distribution of food from the foodora platform in cities such as Stockholm or Prague.
The German supermarket chain REWE already uses these vehicles in Hamburg. After a testing phase, it makes deliveries within a radius of between 1.5 and 2 kilometers around one of its stores, in the Barmbek neighborhood.
The service has some limitations:
Autonomous vehicles with wheels contribute their grain of sand to the acceleration of the last logistic stretch, but, as with drones —also used to deliver food in houses and offices—, they are not a universal solution.
Neither these vehicles nor drones replace the distributor in all cases, but cover very specific sections of the distribution.
In the last mile, it is not the person who introduces more technology who wins, but the one who chooses the right one for each scenario. If not, it loses meaning.