Our friends at Otto just announced their first delivery: a 120-mile beer run from Loveland, Colorado, to Fort Collins.
From the details in the Times article, it sounds like the truck drove autonomously on both highway and surface streets, which is a real accomplishment.
Otto’s truck departed Anheuser-Busch’s facility in Loveland, Colo., in the early morning before reaching the interstate in Fort Collins. The truck drove through Denver — alongside regular passenger car traffic — and navigated to its destination in Colorado Springs without incident.
Uber is expanding from the business of moving people and into the business of moving everything.
The delivery was indicative of Uber’s larger ambitions to become an enormous transportation network, one in which the company is responsible for moving anything, like people, hot meals or cases of beer, around the globe, at all hours and as efficiently as possible. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, has said he envisions a future in which transportation will occur in different ways, using both manned and unmanned vehicles.
David Silver 