Amazon is attempting to revolutionize the shipping and delivery industry. According to sources from The Wall Street Journal, Amazon formed a small team to focus on driverless-vehicle technology and develop the company’s plans to use self-driving cars to serve its business.
This team is tasked with figuring out how the company can use autonomous vehicle technology to deliver packages more quickly. Self-driving cars would be used to deliver packages to customers as well as moving goods in warehouses with the use of autonomous trucks, forklifts, and drones.
Shipping and delivery costs continue to rise for Amazon as it delivers more categories of products. Autonomous vehicles could possibly cut those costs. A shipment that originally took a few days to move across the country in a human-driven vehicle could take half the time with a self-driving car. According to the report, Amazon is mostly interested in autonomous trucking.
Driverless-car technology is just one of many efforts Amazon has recently experimented with to optimize packing and shipping logistics. Amazon already has its own delivery workers that bring packages to their final destinations more quickly in certain areas, and driverless cars would be another way to expedite that process.
Sources: www.https://arstechnica.com