Ocado invests in autonomous grocery delivery

British online grocery company Ocado Group is investing £10 million (C$21 million) in self-driving technology startup Wayve.

Wayve’s technology will be added to a selection of Ocado delivery vans and tested within busy urban areas to see how it handles congested city streets.

“Ocado is on a journey to develop highly intelligent autonomous mobility systems to further transform the operational economics, and proposition, of the Ocado Smart Platform for our OSP retail partners,” said Alex Harvey, chief of advanced technology, Ocado Group, in a press release announcing the deal. 

“We’ve been impressed with Wayve’s approach to solving this most complex of challenges and are excited to accelerate our capabilities so that our retail partners globally can take advantage of them at the earliest opportunity,” added Harvey.

A portion of Ocado’s fleet will also be outfitted with data collection devices Wayve can gather information on how human drivers navigate city traffic in order to fine-tune its technology.

Watch Harvey and Wayve CEO Alex Kendall explain what the companies hope to achieve with this new partnership: