Uber Eats clients in Jersey City can now have their orders delivered by certainly one of Avride’s autonomous sidewalk supply robots.
The launch, which kicked off this week in New Jersey, is Uber’s newest foray into autonomous autos and represents an increasing relationship with Avride. The ride-hail and supply big deploys AVs on its app in 11 cities with six companions, together with Cartken, Coco, Nuro, and Serve Robotics; it’s additionally gearing as much as introduce Waymo’s robotaxis to its app in Austin and Atlanta in early 2025.
Uber initially introduced its partnership with Avride to convey each the corporate’s supply bots and its autonomous autos to the Uber platform in October 2024. Since then the 2 have launched robotic deliveries in Austin and Dallas.
They additionally plan to launch Avride’s self-driving vehicles in Dallas this yr, which might be Avride’s first robotaxi deployment within the U.S. Avride is a spinout from Yandex, the Russian expertise firm that devolved its companies final yr on account of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The startup additionally just lately introduced a tie-up with Grubhub to convey bots to college campuses throughout the U.S., beginning with 100 robots at Ohio State University.
Jersey City is an attention-grabbing, if difficult, alternative. Particularly in February, when a mix of snow, rain, and freezing temperatures might make it troublesome for the little bots to make their deliveries.
Avride says its bots can function within the snow and in “reasonable precipitation.” A spokesperson for the corporate additionally famous that whereas the bots can journey as much as 5 miles per hour with a variety 31 miles on a single cost, their optimum supply vary is inside one to 2 miles.
Avride will function the bots all through one sq. mile of downtown Jersey City, from Hamilton Park to Historic Downtown to the Waterfront, with plans to broaden sooner or later. Avride declined to state what number of bots it could placed on the streets of Jersey City at launch.
A handful of eating places will take part, together with Michelin rated Jiangnan, Rumi Turkish Grill, and Gulp. Customers ordering off the Uber Eats app will have the ability to select between having a conventional courier or an Avride robotic ship their meal.
They’ll additionally have the ability to observe the bot’s location via the Uber Eats app. Customers will get a notification when the bot arrives, and so they can use the app to unlock it and seize their meals.
During Uber’s fourth-quarter earnings report final week, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi famous that 2024 was a turning level for the AV business, which he estimates represents a trillion-dollar alternative within the U.S. alone.
Despite this optimism, he warned that AV commercialization will take some time on account of quite a lot of components, together with excessive prices to outfit autos with sensor fits, a fragmented regulatory setting, seasonal demand fluctuations, and the necessity to obtain “superhuman” ranges of security.
