Driverless Food Delivery Is Here (If You’re In Texas)

We keep being told that automated, driverless food delivery is on its way. And yet…it’s been taking its time. It’s a little bit of a “we’ll have flying cars in the future!” kind of vibe: Tech companies proclaim that we’ll all be relying on newfangled automation soon, that it’s just around the corner, that we won’t be able to live without it – and then it doesn’t arrive. Widescale drone delivery for food remains a way off, and things continue as they’ve always been.

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Apart from in Texas – and specifically, in Austin. Three companies have teamed up to pioneer the first driverless food deliveries in the city, and by the sounds of it, the future might be nearer than we thought. Maybe. Let’s discuss.

Chinese Takeout, Courtesy Of A Tesla Model Y

Yesterday, we learned that Tso’s Chinese Takeout and Delivery, a restaurant chain with five locations in Greater Austin, Texas, has teamed up with autonomous delivery infrastructure platform Autolane and autonomic logistics platform Nash to debut driverless delivery on the Austin streets. Now, full disclosure, I don’t really understand what those latter two companies do, but essentially, having pored over the press release a few times, they orchestrate the logistics and the communications of the driverless cars. Tso’s, naturally, makes the food. 

And then you…order it! And get it! After placing an order with Tso’s, it’ll be matched with an Autolane-coordinated autonomous Tesla Model Y, and it’ll be driven to the customer’s door. Once it arrives, they get a tap-to-open trunk link, get their food out of the back, and confirm that it’s arrived. According to Autolane’s CEO and co-founder Ben Seidl, “this launch is proof that autonomous delivery isn’t a future concept. It’s running today, on real Austin streets, supervised and live, with real orders for real customers.” Aka, that future we’ve already talked about? It’s…here. So they say!

And…Will It Take Off?

That remains to be seen. It’s worth pointing out that Autolane’s fleet of Tesla Model Y vehicles is pretty small: According to an article in EVWire published a few weeks ago, it currently has 13 cars – and while Autolane and Nash expect to announce further partnerships with restaurants later in the year, this still looks like a relatively small-scale operation (and maybe even a soft trial period to see whether it’ll work). Whether it’ll take off on a broader scale depends largely on companies’ abilities to scale driverless delivery up.

Whether people will like it or not is another question — and it’s worth remembering that food companies and autonomic delivery champions have tried to get things like this up and running many times before. In my home town of Milton Keynes in the UK, there was a big splash back in 2018 when it was announced that food would be delivered by autonomous delivery robots. Eight years later, they’re pretty much nowhere to be seen. So…we’ll see how this one goes.