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Comment by samcday | Hacker News Reader

> “We’ve spent the last two and a half years building an amazing team, launching our first unmanned service, working with incredible partners and creating technology to fundamentally improve our daily lives,” Nuro co-founder Dave Ferguson said in a statement.

Is anyone else getting really tired of hearing this kind of rhetoric? This is a company that, if successful in its mission, is going to help eliminate a whole bunch of jobs (delivery drivers, auxiliary grocery chain workers, etc). Yes, it's gonna provide a cool upside - I can have robots deliver my toilet paper to me without having to leave the comfort of my home! But do we really need to describe that as "fundamentally improving our daily lives"?

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I think autonomous drivers as amazing as they help the economy of cars to go from gas to electric much faster. I just hate air pollution as I'm feeling its toxic effects on my body much heavier than other people.

On the other hand I'm sceptical that any company can compete with Waymo's experience or Tesla's amount of data.

Tesla's business model of giving away sensors for free gave it an enormous advantage in acquiring data (which is crucial for deep learning ).

It moves the needle in ways that have not moved much since the advent of fast food and microwave dinners.

- It saves you time.

- It reduces your need for expensive appliances and electric bills.

- It reduces your need for an expensive car.

- It reduces food waste/spoilage.

- It allows cheaper access to delivery for all, especially the disabled/elderly.

Instacart/deliveroo provide all of those advantages - plus - someone to unload the groceries and bring them to your door, which is definitely better. And a human to talk to if there's an issue.

Consumers don't care one bit that their groceries were delivered 'autonomously'.

The 'advantage' of the 'self driving' in the end must be cost - and frankly a significant reduction in cost - or it won't pan out.

In this scenario, there still has to be a picker, a checkout, a loader, and some human overhead on managing a live fleet of cars. The 'savings' will be on the cost of the driver - and that's it. There's also a deficit in experience related to the fact it might not work well for apartment buildings and can't unload etc..

After all the fuss, ops and overhead, this tech has to take the average grocery+delivery bill down by a fairly quantifiable amount or else it won't make sense to use it.

It will happen eventually, it must may not be this company at this valuation.

Nuro versus Instacart is the wrong comparison, in my view. Instacart is B2C, while Nuro, if the Kroger pilot is how they plan to expand, is B2B.

With Instacart, you as a grocery customer decide it’s worth a significant premium to have groceries delivered to your door, with full service. With Nuro, the initial customer is the grocery store itself; to you as the grocery customer, it’s stores with Nuro versus stores without Nuro.

With a service like Nuro, the stores probably hire an extra person or two per shift so some of the floor staff can be assigned picking and loading, spreading out the labor costs. As you say, getting the cost down is critical, and if Nuro succeeds, I could imagine autonomous delivery eventually being priced into part of the standard operating costs for a grocery store.

Kroger already has this with the ClickList grocer pickup service. So instead of loading the groceries into your car the same employees will just load the robot and it will drive to your house. No extra effort or overhead because the same clicklist app will be used for both use cases.

Improving our daily lives is more than just that. You are getting the convenience of faster delivery. Less people in cars means less accidents, less pollution due to optimized speeds/routes, fewer cars due to batching similar tasks together, etc.

Innovation and automation lead to jobs being lost that were based on repetitive, unskilled tasks. However that has been going on for thousands of years and it puts to the burden on the labor force to gain more skills. We can go down the hole of UBI, leisure, specialization, etc. but we shouldn't stop the pace of innovation just because we are worried if society can pick up the slack.

Totally disagree that we should push innovation with no regard for human costs. There has to be a balance. I am worried that my future kids may end up unable to find work or that they might live as the privileged among the sea of homeless.

If you look carefully at their videos, you'll notice that each one of their vehicles is followed by a dark Prius with two people in it, and some videos (others are shot in angles that one cannot be sure) show another dark Prius driving in front of their vehicle.

They've launched a PR stunt, not an unmanned delivery service.

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