With the home delivery season peaking last month as more households than ever elected to Christmas shop from home, researchers, think tanks and civic authorities agree that systemic change is required to enable the benefits of these changing patterns of retail to be realised without the associated problems of congestion and pollution, especially in the UK's urban centres.
StreetDrone, an autonomous technology company, released new images of a 'guilt-free,' direct-to-consumer shopping solution. The driverless Pix-E, the technology in development following wilko's investment in StreetDrone last summer, has the potential to reinvigorate neighbourhood shopping by providing independent retailers with affordable, hyperlocal home deliveries. At a stroke, this enables small or single site businesses to build an omnichannel approach that until now has been the preserve of scale multiples and online-only retailers, thereby reinvigorating the viability of the High Street and reconnecting stores to their neighbourhoods.
But as much as providing neighbourhood shopping with much needed commercial stimulus, Pix-E is as much about matching consumer demand for quick home deliveries with a sustainable, clean, light footprint approach to scaling operations in residential areas which could become overwhelmed with the growth in deliveries, especially during seasonal spikes such as at Christmas.
With research showing home deliveries are set to double by 2030, StreetDrone's own assessments suggest that clean, electric driverless technology has the potential to remove up to 2 billion car journeys dedicated to shopping from UK roads every year and remove up to 7 million tonnes of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere, while also providing retailers with packaging-free deliveries to align with forthcoming Extended Producer Responsibility legislation.
