- 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.
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.
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.