Walmart grocery delivery Walmart

Walmart is testing new driverless vehicles to deliver groceries to shoppers‘ homes.

The vehicles, called R2, are custom built for deliveries and have no seating for drivers or passengers.

The R2 was developed by the robotics company Nuro. Walmart will roll out the R2 and autonomous Toyota Priuses in the Houston area next year as part of a pilot program, Walmart said Tuesday.

The driverless deliveries will be available to Walmart customers who opt into the program, the company said.

Walmart has previously announced driverless delivery tests with Ford in Miami and with Alphabet’s Waymo in Arizona.

„Our unparalleled size and scale has allowed us to steer grocery delivery to the front doors of millions of families — and design a roadmap for the future of the industry,“ Tom Ward, Walmart’s senior vice president of digital operations, wrote in a blog post. „Along the way, we’ve been test-driving a number of different options for getting groceries from our stores to our customers‘ front doors through self-driving technology.“