Go frate express.

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A van ‘ecosystem’

DHL has also been participating in pilot testing of the Trace electric cart that can be purchased with the vans. It has capacity to carry up to 200 pounds (91 kilograms), and is self-propelled, although not (yet) autonomous. Williams said the cart trials have shown it’s well suited in urban centres and in areas where a driver may park a vehicle and then make multiple delivery stops while on foot.

According to BrightDrop, using the cart – which was designed in GM Canada’s Ontario lab – can make urban deliveries up to 25 percent more efficient. Hornyak said that the carts have been tested not only in Toronto’s urban core, but also in New York City, where they provided excellent results.

Hornyak said delivery companies can gain efficiencies by employing gig workers to take the carts from higher-paid van drivers and walk around with them to the final drop-off addresses. “Think of it as bifurcating the process of driving and the last hundred yards,” he explained. “And then you can use either a gig workforce or your own workforce for that last hundred yards. You can better leverage skills, and also, the driver’s more expensive for the most part than the runners. So, now you can lower your total cost delivery.”

BrightDrop has also introduced a version of the cart for grocery fulfillment that has lockable, self-contained and temperature-controlled bins. Hornyak says the grocery carts are designed for in-store picking operations where there just isn’t enough volume to use an automated micro-warehouse or a centralized facility.

According to Rueben Scriven of Interact Analysis, using the carts for in-store fulfillment offers ergonomic benefits for the picker since it is self-powered, and once filled, it can be placed at the entrance of the store for customers to retrieve their orders. “The Trace cart will eventually get loaded into the van and then be used for the customer delivery, and it will be autonomous in nature as well,” he said. “So it will be following the delivery driver as they go out to the customer door. As the system gets more and more integrated, there’ll be more and more efficiency gains that can be developed.”

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