JD.com rolls out fleet of autonomous delivery vans as online shopping giants embrace unmanned operations

The roll out in Changshu city in Jiangsu province began in August after the company tested its Level-4 autonomous driving technology in Wuhan earlier this year

However, analysts say it could take more than 10 years to achieve large-scale use because the technology is expensive and firms need to figure out how to make money

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JD.com plans to deploy 100 autonomous delivery minivans like these in Changshu, a city in eastern China's Jiangsu province, by the end of the year. Photo: Handout

Published: 12:30pm, 22 Oct 2020Updated: 9:52pm, 22 Oct 2020

JD.com, China’s No 2 e-commerce player, will deploy 100 autonomous delivery vehicles on public roads in a Chinese city by the end of the year as the country’s online shopping giants push for more unmanned deliveries amid the pandemic.

“We will continue to increase the investment in logistics technology, and we will also make logistics technologies available to the general public, facilitating social infrastructure upgrades,” Zhenhui Wang, chief executive of JD Logistics, said in a statement on Thursday.

Wang said more than 100,000 of the “autonomous robots”, which look like minivans, will be deployed over the next five years, enhancing customer experience and alleviating the workload of frontline workers.

The Beijing-based company said the unsupervised vehicles, loaded up with parcels, have built-in intelligence to plan their own delivery routes from JD’s delivery stations to the recipient’s addresses.

The roll out in the city of Changshu in coastal Jiangsu province began in August after the company tested its Level-4 autonomous driving technology in Wuhan, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak in China, with the self-driving minivans delivering over 13,000 packages and traveling 6,800 kilometres when the city was under lock-down mode.

After arriving at the designated delivery location, the system messages or calls the recipient with a retrieval code so they can pick it up. It is programmed to wait a certain amount of time before leaving the residential compound or office building. If the customer does not pick up the package, the delivery will be rescheduled, according to the company.