Most autonomous vehicles are being developed by adding automation to pre-existing platforms.
That’s a bit like the original as the original horseless carriages.
One class of vehicle, however, that seems to be adapting its own form factors are street-legal delivery vehicles.
Compare the Huawei-Neolix design to Nuro.
A few things pop out:
The vehicles both look like they could drive equally well forward or backward, although Nuro’s vehicle has a clear back bumper.
Neither vehicle looks like it could drive side-to-side. The steering is nonholonomic, as the mechanical engineers would say.
Both vehicles have front and rear doors.
Both vehicles appear to have compute and drivetrain at stowed underneath the cargo compartments.
I wonder how close this look is to what we will see in the future.
David Silver 