China’s last-mile delivery just got a shot of adrenaline, and possibly a few parking tickets, courtesy of its new, utterly determined autonomous delivery vans. Forget your drones and your fancy robot dogs – these four-wheeled titans are forging their own path, quite literally.
As a rather eye-opening compilation of their recent exploits reveals, trifling matters like freshly poured concrete, errant motorcycles, or even the quaint notion of “traffic laws” are seemingly mere advisory notes on their single-minded quest for peak logistical efficiency.
E-commerce behemoths JD.com, Alibaba, and Neolix have already unleashed thousands of these L4 autonomous vehicles onto the streets. They’re now a common, if occasionally bewildering, sight across more than 30 cities. The slight hitch, which is proving rather hilarious for onlookers and less so for infrastructure, is that their pathfinding algorithms appear to interpret “most direct route” with a rather liberal disregard for anything remotely resembling an obstacle.
