Ford Wants to Get in on Drone Deliveries, Too

UPS is already using drones on top of vans to assist deliveries in rural areas, and now Ford wants to do the aforementioned affair in busy cities.

This is how information technology plans to diversify its automotive business concern.

Nextcar Bug art The automaker at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week showed off an "Autolivery" concept that relies on electric cocky-driving vans and drones to peddle packages from point A to B. The idea, devised past a team of Ford employees in Shanghai, is that the vans transport appurtenances part of the way, and the drones take over for the last leg of the journey.

The system could be used to transport everything from groceries to medical supplies, and allow for deliveries to places "inaccessible by car, such as high upwards in a tower block—or where parking would be difficult, impractical, or unsafe," Ford said. Say yous're getting set up for a dinner political party, for instance, and you realize y'all forgot to pick upward the lemons. In the futurity, you lot may be able to club a bag of lemons and have them autolivered in just the nick of time.

Ford says the concept could not only amend people's lives, but "pave the mode to a more than sustainable time to come." In its news release, the automaker backed up those points with new data from traffic and navigation app Inrix indicating that drivers in Europe's cities spent upwardly to 91 hours sitting in traffic during 2022.

"Information technology's all about making life in the city easier," Ford designer Euishik Bang, who developed the concept aslope colleagues James Kuo and Chelsia Lau, said in a statement. "The possibility of harnessing autonomous and electric vehicle technology with drones to quickly and easily send and deliver parcels could help to make life improve for everyone."

Ford said it plans to take a fully autonomous vehicle ready for commercial ride sharing, ride hailing, and packet commitment fleets in 2022. Looking forward, the company as well expects electrical vehicles to outnumber their gas-guzzling counterparts in the next fifteen years, and for shared transportation to continue gaining popularity.

Virtually Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo is PCMag's expert on fitness and smart home products. Education yoga for well-nigh 10 years has helped her in evaluating a range of connected health products including fettle trackers, heart rate monitors, rowers, smart scales, stationary bikes, force training machines, treadmills, and more. Angela as well tests smart home devices from her ranch in Florida, including air purifiers, kitchen appliances, and robot vacuums, only to name a few.