{"id":380840,"date":"2026-07-21T12:00:20","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T12:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/380840\/"},"modified":"2026-07-21T12:00:20","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T12:00:20","slug":"driverless-food-delivery-is-here-if-youre-in-texas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/380840\/","title":{"rendered":"Driverless Food Delivery Is Here (If You’re In Texas)"},"content":{"rendered":"

We keep being told that automated, driverless food delivery is on its way. And yet\u2026it\u2019s been taking its time. It\u2019s a little bit of a \u201cwe\u2019ll have flying cars in the future!\u201d kind of vibe: Tech companies proclaim that we\u2019ll all be relying on newfangled automation soon, that it\u2019s just around the corner, that we won\u2019t be able to live without it \u2013 and then it doesn\u2019t arrive. Widescale drone delivery for food remains a way off<\/a>, and things continue as they\u2019ve always been.<\/p>\n

Apart from in Texas \u2013 and specifically, in Austin. Three companies have teamed up to pioneer the first driverless food deliveries in the city, and by the sounds of it, the future might be nearer than we thought. Maybe. Let\u2019s discuss.<\/p>\n

Chinese Takeout, Courtesy Of A Tesla Model Y<\/p>\n

Yesterday, we learned that Tso\u2019s Chinese Takeout<\/a> and Delivery, a restaurant chain with five locations in Greater Austin, Texas, has teamed up with autonomous delivery infrastructure platform Autolane and autonomic logistics platform Nash to debut driverless delivery on the Austin streets. Now, full disclosure, I don\u2019t really understand what those latter two companies do, but essentially, having pored over the press release<\/a> a few times, they orchestrate the logistics and the communications of the driverless cars. Tso\u2019s, naturally, makes the food.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then you\u2026order it! And get it! After placing an order with Tso\u2019s, it\u2019ll be matched with an Autolane-coordinated autonomous Tesla Model Y, and it\u2019ll be driven to the customer\u2019s door. Once it arrives, they get a tap-to-open trunk link, get their food out of the back, and confirm that it\u2019s arrived. According to Autolane\u2019s CEO and co-founder Ben Seidl, \u201cthis launch is proof that autonomous delivery isn\u2019t a future concept. It\u2019s running today, on real Austin streets, supervised and live, with real orders for real customers.\u201d Aka, that future we\u2019ve already talked about? It\u2019s\u2026here. So they say!<\/p>\n

And\u2026Will It Take Off?<\/p>\n

That remains to be seen. It\u2019s worth pointing out that Autolane\u2019s fleet of Tesla Model Y vehicles is pretty small: According to an article in EVWire<\/a> published a few weeks ago, it currently has 13 cars \u2013 and while Autolane and Nash expect to announce further partnerships with restaurants later in the year, this still looks like a relatively small-scale operation (and maybe even a soft trial period to see whether it\u2019ll work). Whether it\u2019ll take off on a broader scale depends largely on companies\u2019 abilities to scale driverless delivery up. <\/p>\n

Whether people will like it or not is another question \u2014 and it\u2019s worth remembering that food companies and autonomic delivery champions have tried to get things like this up and running many times before. In my home town of Milton Keynes in the UK, there was a big splash back in 2018 when it was announced that food would be delivered by autonomous delivery robots. Eight years later, they\u2019re pretty much nowhere to be seen. So\u2026we\u2019ll see how this one goes. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We keep being told that automated, driverless food delivery is on its way. And yet\u2026it\u2019s been taking its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":380841,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":["post-380840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380840\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/380841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}