Kroger Tests Driverless Cars for Grocery Deliveries

At a time when big-box retailers are trying to offer the same conveniences as their online competitors, the grocery chain Kroger is testing the use of driverless cars to deliver groceries in a Phoenix suburb.

The project from Kroger, the biggest supermarket chain in the United States, is part of an effort to fend off a rising threat from Amazon and Walmart, which have been pushing their online grocery offerings.

Kroger’s pilot program started on Thursday with a robotic vehicle parked outside one of its Fry’s supermarkets in Scottsdale. A store clerk loaded grocery bags into the back seat of a car with two men in the front seats, one with a laptop. Both were there to monitor the car’s performance.

Under the self-driving service, shoppers can order same-day or next-day delivery online or on a mobile app for a flat rate of about $6. After the order is placed, a driverless vehicle will deliver the groceries curbside. Customers are required to be present to collect them.

During the next phase of testing in the fall, deliveries will be made by an autonomous vehicle with no human aboard. The vehicles will probably be opened with a numeric code.

Kroger, based in Cincinnati, is using Toyota Prius vehicles for the project in partnership with Nuro, a Silicon Valley start-up founded by two engineers who worked on autonomous vehicles at Google.

“Our goal is to save people time, while operating safely and learning how we can further improve the experience,” Dave Ferguson, a Nuro co-founder, said in a statement.

Waymo, Google’s autonomous vehicle project, started a similar pilot program last month at Walmart stores in Phoenix. In that case, self-driving vehicles transport customers to and from their selected Walmart location to pick up online grocery orders.

That is not the only venture Waymo has in metropolitan Phoenix. Waymo has been trying out a service where bus and light-rail riders can order an autonomous car to take them to their nearest transit stop. Employees with Valley Metro, the agency that manages Phoenix-area transit lines, are serving as test riders. The project, started earlier this month, has Waymo employees gathering data from test drives, the agency said.

Arizona continues to be a testing ground for self-driving technology, despite a fatal crash involving an autonomous vehicle earlier this year.

A self-driving Uber sport-utility vehicle struck and killed a 49-year-old woman in March in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe. The woman was crossing a darkened road outside of a crosswalk. A National Transportation and Safety Board investigation showed the backup driver had been streaming a television show for more than 40 minutes before the accident while the vehicle was in autonomous mode.

Uber later ended the testing of self-driving cars in Arizona, but the company has since restarted its autonomous vehicles in Pittsburgh.