Courtesy of Walmart
- Walmart is expanding its pilot with autonomous vehicle company Gatik.
- Beginning in 2021, Gatik’s “autonomous box trucks” will begin fulfilling customer orders without safety drivers, driving products between a dark store and a Walmart Neighborhood Market in Bentonville, Arkansas.
- “We’ll be working with Gatik to monitor and gather new data to help us stay on the leading edge of driverless autonomous vehicles,” Tom Ward, Walmart’s senior vice president of customer product, said.
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A Walmart Neighborhood Market in Bentonville, Arkansas, will soon start receiving shipments delivered via a driverless box truck, as part of the retail giant’s expanded pilot with autonomous vehicle startup Gatik.
According to Walmart, the Gatik pilot has logged 70,000 operational miles “in autonomous mode” with a safety driver behind the wheel to monitor deliveries since its launch in 2019. Walmart’s expansion of initial tests will see Gatik’s “multi-temperature Autonomous Box Trucks” operate that same two-mile route without a driver starting next year.
“This achievement marks a new milestone that signifies the first ever driverless operation carried out on the supply chain middle mile for both Gatik and Walmart,” Tom Ward, Walmart senior vice president of customer product, said in a statement.
The original pilot in Bentonville, Arkansas, also the retail giant’s headquarters, involved Gatik’s vehicles moving orders between the aforementioned Walmart Neighborhood Market location and a “dark store” two miles away. Walmart dark stores contain merchandise, but are not open to the public.
“We’ll be working with Gatik to monitor and gather new data to help us stay on the leading edge of driverless autonomous vehicles,” Ward said.
Walmart also announced that its initial pilot with Gatik, featuring a safety driver, will now expand to Louisiana, allowing both companies to test out "an even longer delivery route." The retailer will have a Gatik vehicle carry customer orders from a Walmart Supercenter in New Orleans to a customer pickup location in Metairie, Louisiana, 2o miles away.
As Walmart looks to compete in retail's delivery wars against rivals like Amazon, autonomous vehicles will ultimately play an important role in its ongoing strategy of improving delivery times to customers. So too will drones, as the company has already agreed to iniital pilots with a trio of drone companies, including DroneUp and Flytrex.
Ward previously said that the company's Express Delivery service, which offers two-hour delivery on a slew of products, has reached 2,800 stores and 65% of households in the US since its April launch.