Bitauto News Recently, the third-generation pure electric driverless delivery vehicle jointly developed and designed by BYD and the American technology innovation company Nuro was officially released. The project was launched in August 2019 and is scheduled to go into mass production in early 2023. In the future, we will provide smarter and more environmentally friendly delivery services to local consumers in the United States.
In this cooperation, BYD is responsible for vehicle development, vehicle testing and manufacturing, and also provides core first-level assembly components such as blade batteries, motors, electronic controls and human-computer interaction. Nuro provides technologies such as autonomous driving, gateways, control modules and sensors. The entire vehicle production is completed by BYD's China plant, and the assembly of vehicle power batteries and autonomous driving components is completed by BYD's Lancaster plant in the United States.
It is reported that the third generation of driverless delivery vehicles has greater carrying capacity and higher safety. The new model has twice the cargo capacity of the previous generation model and is equipped with partitions to give users more flexible storage space. The car is also equipped with a temperature-controlled compartment to ensure that the cargo is at a suitable temperature. In addition, it is also equipped with external airbags and a multi-mode sensing suite, including cameras, lidar and thermal imaging cameras, to sense the surrounding environment in all directions.
Nuro was founded in Silicon Valley in 2016 by Zhu Jiajun and Dave Ferguson, former chief engineers of Google’s self-driving team. The company focuses on the development of self-driving freight vehicles and has launched two generations of self-driving delivery vehicles. Delivery services to restaurants, grocery stores, etc. In February 2019, Nuro received a US$940 million investment from Japan's SoftBank Group to further expand the coverage of its fleet and delivery services. In November 2021, Nuro announced the completion of a US$600 million Series D financing. In the same year, Nuro established a long-term partnership with FedEx and launched a pilot delivery service in Houston with Domino's Pizza. So far, Nuro has successfully completed autonomous delivery trials in communities in Texas, Arizona and California.