Walmart Experiments With Self-Driving Grocery Pickups Via Waymo

Walmart has been around for 56 years, but the brick-and-mortar retail chain continues to experiment with 21st-century means of getting people to buy products from its stores. The company announced Wednesday that it will partner with a major self-driving car firm to launch a pilot program aimed at helping people pick up online grocery orders.

The initiative will utilize the autonomous driving technology developed by Waymo. Once a part of Google, Waymo was formally spun off into its own entity within the umbrella of Google’s parent company Alphabet in 2016. The participants in this pilot program, known as “early riders,” can ride in driverless cars to and from a single Walmart store in Chandler, Arizona, to get groceries.

These customers will need to purchase groceries using Walmart’s online grocery pickup tool. Once they have done that, they can take the autonomous shuttle to the Chandler store to get their groceries. Walmart employees will put together the orders so there is minimal waiting involved, per the company press release.

A Walmart spokesperson told NPR that the early riders can take these driverless rides for no additional charge. Aside from that, they will get unspecified incentives to participate in the experimental, small-scale program.

Whether this ever becomes a large-scale project that serves multiple Walmart stores remains to be seen. Uber infamously had to shut down its self-driving chauffeur service in Arizona and elsewhere after an autonomous vehicle, with a distracted driver behind the wheel, struck and killed a pedestrian earlier this year.

The Waymo partnership is just the latest attempt from Walmart to modernize its offerings and hope to compete with the retail behemoth that is Amazon. Walmart acquired the Jet.com delivery service in the hopes of serving markets it previously could not, such as New York City. However, the plan has seen limited success so far.