Are You Being Served?

Why Robotics Represent a Trojan Pony in the Automotive Sector.

HOW LONG do you spend thinking about the future? Every Tuesday afternoon, Jeff Bezos’ S-Team settle down for four hours to do so. In this period they consider not just the next quarter, but the next quarter-of-a-century. It won’t have taken Bezos more than the first few minutes of such a meeting to note that meal deliveries are on the rise. Dutch company Takeaway.com reported total orders for 2019 jumping 70%, due to in part to a 113% spike in the German market. Globally, 25-34 year-olds order-in meals six times a month. That leaves 24 more days still to serve. (Though if you thought all those deliveries meant a more varied diet, think again: the most ordered food on Uber Eats in Britain is McDonalds.) That this growing market should bear so close a resemblance to Meals on Wheels suggests a correlation between living on one's own and food deliveries.

These data have created an influx of investment in delivery robots and mechatronics. One beneficiary of Amazon’s post-prandial digestion is Rivian when Bezos added 100,000 units to his cart. In the UK, Russian-backed Arrival recently proclaimed itself a unicorn after an investment of more than $100 million from Hyundai Kia, while San Francisco-based Nuro is bolstered by nearly $1 billion from the SoftBank Vision Fund.

In what marks a milestone in mobility, Nuro was recently granted an FVMSS, a permit that allows their R2 to drive autonomously on the road. Unhindered by the safety requirements for carrying passengers and minus the complexity of a fully-fettled car interior, the potential ubiquity of robotics would endow manufacturers with high brand-visibility. This might seem tangential to the automotive industry, but car brands could feel the heat: by the time legislation allows autonomous vehicles to carry passengers, robotic companies will be well-established in the technology, plus have years of user-data.

Car manufacturers have not lain dormant. Last year Toyota crammed the Tokyo Motor Show with a whole roster of electric vehicle, such as the Micro Palette which resembes an upright suitcase on roller-skates, while Renault has previously shown the 2018 EZ-PRO concept to tease the future of vans. Indeed, the automotive companies best positioned to benefit are those with a commercial arm that can be expanded into robotics, to ensure knowledge transfer from one sector to the other, from passenger-free to passenger-carrying.

One absentee from the list of incumbents is Dyson, who last year pulled out of the race to develop an electric car. Yet Dyson is surely optimally positioned to develop robots as a natural extension to their innovative function-orientated products. Delivery bots could offer the ideal stepping-stone between expanding the brand out from the home into mobility, opening the possibility to develop autonomous cars when regulations permit.

When carriages lost their horses at the end of the 19th century, engineers pursued a plethora of packages in the nascent automotive industry. Benz made front passengers sit backwards in the 1896 Vis-à-Vis, a layout which has since become shorthand for autonomous cars, while the 1903 De Dietric-Bugatti Type 5 remarkably placed a chasm between the 12.9 litre straight-four and the cockpit, leaving the driver precariously perched behind the rear-axle where the trunk would have been. It took the 1901 Mercedes Simplex to establish the layout we recognise today.

Robotics are going through a similar gestation. From the pony-sized Nuro R2 to conventionally-sized vans, not to mention drones, a multitude of concepts are being explored. Even Continental demonstrated robotic dogs at CES last month. The driver of this variety is context. The vehicle delivering your Dean & Deluca in suburbia will not be the one that can slip into an elevator or hover outside your balcony door. Smaller vehicles are ideal for pedestrianised areas, but battery range limits out-of-town usage. And though a robot might make it up your drive-way, getting your groceries up the front steps and into the fridge without your noticing will be the next challenge. Expect to see Darwinian solutions to specific contexts, and a Galapagosian variety of species, at least until smart cities homogenise infrastructure.

One crucial difference between cars and robots is that cars are typically B2C, whereas robots are B2B. The customer for delivery robots is not the user, the person working from home waiting for lunch: it is UPS, Domino’s Pizza, Walmart and all those other brands quickly partnering. If the delivery bot is there simply to serve, it risks being overshadowed by the brand of goods being delivered. However, managed correctly, robotic brands can be present across the user journey, from app-to-door, and become synonymous with convenience and trust. Using design to leverage brand strength will ensure longevity as companies mature, by establishing a red-thread between channels that serve as a basis for successive generations and model variants. Having brands as strong as the technology will be essential to help customers -and users -navigate this proliferating sector.