Walmart Teams With Ford and Argo AI for Autonomous Delivery
Walmart partners with Ford and Argo AI to launch an autonomous vehicle delivery service in three major US cities. The initiative focuses on delivering online grocery orders directly to customers' homes.
Walmart partners with Ford and Argo AI to launch an autonomous vehicle delivery service in Austin, Miami, and Washington, D.C. Customers place online orders for groceries and other items through Walmart’s platform, and Argo’s cloud-based infrastructure handles the routing and scheduling of these deliveries. The commercial service starts in specific geographic areas within each city and expands over time.
The collaboration uses Ford vehicles equipped with Argo AI’s self-driving technology to demonstrate the potential for autonomous delivery at scale. This effort builds on a previous 2018 partnership between Walmart and Ford that studied the user experience of grocery delivery using simulated self-driving vehicles in Miami-Dade County. Argo AI CEO Bryan Salesky emphasizes that this latest step shows how autonomous delivery services operate in real-world environments.
This announcement highlights Austin and Miami as central hubs for Ford and Argo AI's commercialization strategies. Alongside this delivery initiative, the companies plan to deploy at least 1,000 self-driving vehicles on Lyft’s ride-hailing network over the next five years, starting with these same two cities. The companies begin testing the Walmart delivery service later this year.