Chinese start-up Neolix bets on robo-vans for deliveries, signs up JD.com and Huawei as customers
- Neolix expects to deliver 1,000 vehicles this year, which costs about US$30,000 a piece
- The company’s unmanned delivery vehicles are operating in the new Xiongan economic zone, some areas of Beijing and in the city of Changzhou
Forget drones. The future of deliveries may be robo-vans.
A Chinese start-up called Neolix kicked off mass production of its self-driving delivery vehicles on Friday – saying it’s the first company globally to do so – and has lined up giants such as JD.com and Huawei Technologies as customers. Neolix expects to deliver a thousand of the vehicles, which resemble tiny vans, within the first year as it broadens out.
The implications are potentially huge: Billionaire Jack Ma predicts there will be 1 billion deliveries a day in China within a decade and the commercialisation of the technology could provide lessons for autonomous vehicles carrying passengers. Neolix isn’t alone in this space as Silicon Valley’s Nuro raised almost US$1 billion this year and is starting to deliver groceries in Arizona.
“Driverless cars will change the world, just like the shift from the carriage to the automobile,” Neolix founder Yu Enyuan, 45, said in an interview at his office in Beijing. “I have been looking for something that is worth fighting with everything I have and what I am doing now is that.”
Yu has been testing more than a hundred of the vehicles in enclosed areas such as Chinese campuses. The vehicles are priced similar to a regular car – a Neolix van costs about US$30,000.
The entrepreneur, who was previously an inventor of smart tools for the logistics industry, said delivery of goods is just the start. Down the road, he envisages fleets of robo-vans providing everything from 24/7 mobile vending to help with running errands.