toytota’s e-palette, GM’s AV cruise, ford, tesla, global giants, little startups, concepts, promises — the automotive industry, or, if you prefer, the mobility solutions industry is at the height of a ‘step right up, folks’ era. and every vendor, big and small, is packing some, if not all, of 2017s hot-button industrial design trends into these various-sized boxes. an ‘entirely different’ fully-electric, fully-autonomous, certainly-not-a-car comes out every two weeks, but hiding in plain sight, in the back of this carnival of pain-point-slayers and road-map-cartographers, two ex-google engineers are working hard on making something real: a company, a startup, an autonomous vehicle of their own, nuro.

nuro
all images courtesy of nuro

 

 

nuro describes their self-titled product as ‘the self driving vehicle made for local goods transportation.’ the idea is refreshingly specific and well-past the photoshop-photoshop-photoshop-so-investors-buy-in phase. the vehicle’s sensor array, located on the roof, houses cameras, radars, and LIDAR, all necessary to make the vehicle safely autonomous; of course, there wouldn’t be any manual controls, pedals, gears, steering wheels, or anything like that. it’s a mobile grocery cart and that isn’t a dis.

nuro

 

 

nuro, thankfully, isn’t trying to change the way humans get from point a to point b. they aren’t trying to design an entirely new mobility system that will pave the way for future generations. they’ve just made an autonomous delivery boy — one that excels at the last-mile transportation of laundry, or food, or medicine. they’ve designed something great that can happen in the background of our lives. nuro is doing great things quietly, while the usual suspects scramble last minute on the world stage, sweat dripping down their curly mustaches, ‘did we mention, it isn’t shaped like a car!?’