Driverless Delivery Startup Raises $1 Billion From Softbank Because That's Just the Beginning...

The key insight is that Softbank - and the delivery vehicle's creators - believe that they can incrementally demonstrate its safe operation at lower speeds without human payloads, but then increase speed and begin to carry humans, challenging Waymo, Uber et al in a less expensive way.

Under the radar, as it were....JL 

Timothy Lee reports in ars technica:

A Kroger-owned store in Phoenix is using Nuro to deliver groceries to customers. These robots are smaller than a conventional car and are driverless—they don't even have space inside for a human driver to sit. Nuro's robot has a top speed of 25 miles per hour (40 km/h), a shorter stopping distance than a vehicle traveling at 65 miles per hour. The vehicle doesn't need to see as far ahead, and its doesn't need to predict other vehicles' behavior too far in advance. Deliveries could become a stepping stone to passenger services. Once Nuro can operate safely at 25 miles per hour, (it) can bump the top speed up to 30 miles per hour and so forth.

The autonomous delivery startup Nuro has raised $940 million from The Softbank Vision Fund, making it one of the most lavishly funded startups in the driverless car sector. The news comes after Nuro became one of the first startups in the world to begin operating a fully driverless commercial service on public roads.
Under a deal announced last year, a Kroger-owned Fry's Foods store in the Phoenix area is using Nuro's technology to deliver groceries to nearby customers. Initially, the deliveries were conducted by modified Toyota Priuses. But in December, Nuro added two custom-designed robots to its fleet. These robots are smaller than a conventional car and are fully driverless—they don't even have space inside for a human driver to sit.
"Our goal this year is to really scale to an entire city worth of operation," CEO Dave Ferguson told Ars last week.
Nuro's robot has a top speed of 25 miles per hour (40 km/h), which simplified the jump to fully driverless operation. A vehicle moving at 25 miles per hour has a much shorter stopping distance than a vehicle traveling at 65 miles per hour. That means the vehicle doesn't need to see as far ahead, and its software doesn't need to predict other vehicles' behavior too far in advance. In the rare event that a Nuro robot does run someone or something over, its lower mass and speed means it's also much less likely to cause serious damage.While Nuro's two custom robots are fully driverless, they are currently being followed around by human-driven vehicles with the capacity to intervene if the robots malfunction. Ferguson told Ars that he hopes to stop using the chase vehicles by next quarter.
Nuro was founded in 2016 by Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu, both veterans of Google's self-driving car project. The latest fundraising round represents a dramatic 10-fold increase over Nuro's previous funding round. A year ago, Nuro raised $92 million.

I tried to write this story as straight news, but I'm personally quite bullish on Nuro. This seems like a clearly valuable application of the technology and as far as I can tell they're closer to full driverless operation than anyone else. It's easy to imagine them operating a fleet of thousands of these things all over the US in five years, and millions globally in a decade.

And as I'll argue in a bigger piece coming out later this week, deliveries could easily become a stepping stone to higher-speed passenger services a few years down the road. Once Nuro has data showing that they can operate safely at 25 miles per hour, then can gradually bump the top speed up to 30 miles per hour, then 35, and so forth. This kind of gradualist approach seems more realistic than the Waymo approach of jumping straight to operating a fully-driverless taxi service at freeway speeds.