Recently, the third generation of pure electric driverless delivery vehicle jointly developed and designed by BYD and the American science and technology innovation company Nuro was officially released. The project started in August 2019 and is scheduled to go into mass production in early 2023.
In this partnership, BYD is responsible for vehicle development, vehicle testing, and manufacturing, while providing core first-class assembly components such as blade batteries, motors, electronic controls, and human-computer interaction. Nuro offers technologies for autonomous driving, gateways, control modules and sensors. The production of the whole vehicle is completed by BYD's Plant in China, and the assembly of vehicle power batteries and autonomous driving parts is completed by BYD's Lancaster plant in the United States.
The new model carries twice as much cargo as the previous model and is equipped with partitions to give users more flexible storage space. The car is also equipped with a temperature-controlled compartment to ensure that the goods are at the right temperature. It is also equipped with external airbags and a multi-mode sensing kit, including cameras, lidar and thermal imaging cameras, for a full view of the surrounding environment.
Founded in Silicon Valley in 2016 by Former Principal Engineers of Google's Autonomous Driving Team, Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson, Nuro focuses on developing autonomous cargo vehicles and has launched two generations of self-driving delivery vehicles for delivery services in restaurants, grocery stores and other scenarios.
In February 2019, Nuro received a US$940 million investment from Japan's SoftBank Group to further expand the coverage of its fleet and distribution services. In November 2021, Nuro announced the completion of a $600 million Series D funding round. That same year, Nuro formed a long-term partnership with FedEx and launched a pilot delivery service with Domino's Pizza in Houston. To date, Nuro has successfully completed pilot automated delivery runs in communities in Texas, Arizona, and California.