In the wake of several high-profile setbacks for self-driving car companies, one local company is going the other way, building up a fleet of autonomous delivery vehicles on Metroplex streets.
Estonian company Clevon is expanding its self-driving couriers to new areas in DFW in the coming months, using the Fort Worth area to launch its efforts to build a national delivery network.
On the busy streets by Alliance Airport, another vehicle whisks a package off to its destination.
But this one stands out easily: because there’s no one behind the wheel.
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“Our on-demand electric vehicle is working as a robot courier,” said Sander Sebastian Agur, Clevon’s CEO and co-founder.
This is the autonomous delivery vehicle from Clevon, an Estonian company that made its US headquarters in Fort Worth in 2022.
Their robot-piloted vehicles have been delivering packages on the street in the Northlake community since July.
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“There’s a shortage of drivers and the ever-increasing cost of last-mile delivery, which is what technology can solve today,” Agur said.
So what does that technology look like? NBC 5 tried it out.
We placed an order for a food delivery through a popular app, standing in an area where Clevon delivers.
Within minutes, the vehicle navigated itself to our location, allowing us to punch in a keycode to retrieve our delivery from a locker built inside.
Clevon’s efforts to expand come as the self-driving vehicle industry has suffered some high-profile setbacks this month.
Tesla issued a recall for more than 2 million of its vehicles in December due to concerns surrounding the monitoring system for their Autopilot function.
Days later, GM-owned company Cruise laid off 24% of its workforce months after pulling its self-driving cars from the streets, following complaints that the cars caused traffic jams and near misses on the road in Austin.
NBC5 asked Clevon how they’re working to prevent their vehicles from causing accidents.
“So we have built a fallback mechanism which is human supervised,” Agur said.
Inside Clevon’s operations center, a real person in a driving simulator can access every vehicle on the road – taking control of the car if they get an alert that something’s gone wrong.
Clevon told NBC 5 this tech was part of the reason their cars have never been in an accident during their operations in Europe or the United States, and they’re ready to expand, hoping to put 10,000 of the vehicles in use across the US by 2028.
“So you’ll be seeing more robots on the roads pretty soon,” Agur said.
The company told NBC 5 they’re expanding into Denton in the next three months, and the city of Arlington is now launching a pilot program to use these vehicles for food bank deliveries.