But it's not possible to have a standard system. How would a self drive vehicle deliver here? Many of our pavements in this hilly estate have intermittent staircases, often long. Even at my home, one of many flats like it, the approach to the front door of the block is another set of stairs up from the pavement. And how does the self drive vehicle enter the front door and go up staircases to the flats on upper floors?
This is the factor missed by the advocates of self drive deliveries, that we have a society where couples go to work and deliveries are so often to empty homes with nobody to receive them. Delivery drivers can solve that problem, self drive vehicles can't.
There are better and simpler solutions, some already here but not realised. One is the trend to get the customer to play a part in the delivery in various ways, an example being the big growth in Click and Collect and the like. Another is many couriers no longer repeating a failed delivery, instead dropping the item at a retail collect point for the customer to collect.
This is an example of what I meant when I forecast going backwards to make progress. Originally we all did our own shopping, collecting everything, but then with internet shopping we got lazy getting everything delivered to our doors. Now increasingly customers are part of the delivery process in a collection stage, Guerney mentioning it too, and I see that greatly increasing. It's a variant on how we now so often check ourselves out in supermarkets, assistantless automation. That future with us playing a part works, driverless deliveries doesn't, both for the reasons mentioned and innumerable others.
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