Recently, Renault revealed a new self-driving car that targets last-mile deliveries.
This remarkable development comes amid competition for this growing market continuing to elicit considerable investment and interest.
For Renault, a France-based multinational automobile manufacturer, the service is expected to revolve around an electric autonomous driving pod dubbed EZ-Pro, which was developed to not only reach businesses and homes but also minimize the effects on urban and traffic congestion.
“Renault EZ-Pro shows our vision of last-mile delivery integrated with the ecosystem of smart cities of tomorrow and the needs of professionals,” explained Ashwani Gupta, who is the senior vice president for light Commercial Vehicles for Alliance, a partnership that includes Mitsubishi, Nissan, and Renault.
Renault is expected to take the wraps off its newest concept at the Hannover Motor Show that will be held this week.
The focus of this year’s event will be commercial trucking.
For the case of EZ-Pro, the cars will make up a series of self-driving robo-pods that are not only modular but can also be adapted in a bid to provide distinct cargo configurations.
Despite being driverless cars, there will still be a human being on board several cars. However, the role of these individuals will simply be managing delivery and monitoring the pods.
The advantage of this technology is that a single human can oversee several other robo-pods simultaneously, which gets rid of the need to have a human operator on each car.
Renault envisions the robo-pods moving autonomously or as a fleet in a given platoon. In either of the cases, all the pods will be linked through a centralized platform, which will, in turn, enable them to complete deliveries for one or several customers.
Renault looks forward to the system making things a lot easier, primarily for clients to schedule delivery.
This will either be to their homes or through lockers that can be opened using a smartphone application.
The newest car comes after Renault announced EZ-Go, its electric autonomous driving car for people.
What’s more, the company did not disclose a timeline for when its electric autonomous driving pod, EZ-Pro would hit the market.
Source VentureBeat
