Dave Ferguson. Photo / Dean Purcell
Americans will soon have pizzas delivered by driverless vehicles created by Nuro - thanks to New Zealander and accidental entrepreneur Dave Ferguson - back in his home country this week for the first time since the Covid outbreak to accept a 2022 Kea World Class Award.
Nuro is a robotics firm, and will release a range of products over time. But for the moment its first product - the driverless delivery vehicle - is getting all the buzz.
And in footage from tests - which have included a trial for select Domino's customers in Houston last year - it certainly looks nifty. An app alerts a customer when a Nuro is pulling up outside their house (using a mix of cameras, mapping lasers and microphones to guide itself). You walk up to the vehicle, then punch in a pin code into a touchscreen to open a compartment holding your Hawaiian, or whatever you've bought online.
The six-year-old Nuro has a working prototype with regulatory approval to "drive" on public roads in the US state of Texas, and is working with partners including FedEx, Domino's, pharmacy chain CVS and grocery giant Kroger.
Ferguson and co-founder Jiajun Zhu have raised more than US$2 billion from backers including Softbank, Google and Tiger Global Management (run by Chase Coleman, one of the late billionaire Julian Robertson's "Tiger cubs").
And the pair have 1400 off their own staff, and BYD - the Chinese giant billed as the world's largest EV maker - as their manufacturing partner at its plant near Los Angeles.
If all goes to plan, they'll be a mass rollout beginning in a couple of years.
And forget reaching "unicorn" status (venture capital slang for a startup that's reached a private equity value topping $1b), Nuro's most recent capital raise, last year, was at a US$8.6b ($13.8b) valuation.
Ferguson never set out to be the next Elon Musk.
He arrived at Otago University in 1997 with plans to complete an LLB.
"I thought I was going to be a lawyer," he says.
A friend suggested he would enjoy throwing a computer science paper into his pre-law year.
He took to the computer science school. "I got to work with a professor there, Dr Margaret Jeffries, who got the first robot ever for the department. And that was what really inspired me and got me pumped about robots, and that sort of everything snowballed from there."
Said snowballing led to a PhD in Robotics and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. "It was like a Disney World of robotics, it was and still is, and I just was totally hooked," Ferguson says.
"I participated in a bunch of different robot applications, including a big competition called the Darpa Urban Challenge, where we had robots racing each other in a mock urban environment. And from that point, I really became very, very excited about self-driving vehicles in particular."
(Darpa is the US Government's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which supports R&D across a broad spectrum of startups. It provided key funding during Rocket Lab's early stages.)
Ferguson went on to join Google's self-driving car project - today known as Waymo - as a principle engineer and machine-learning lead before leaving in 2016 to co-found Nuro with Zhu (also a principle engineer on Google's driverless car project).
The pair's first-generation driverless car was a modified Prius. Now, with their third-gen model, they've designed their own vehicle from scratch.
While there are numerous self-driving vehicle initiatives, Ferguson says the like of Kroger like Nuro's total focus on driverless delivery.
The fact there are no humans involved (Waymo is working on a driverless taxi, designed to have people in the backseat) has also made it a lot easier for Nuro to navigate the complex regulatory landscape and gain all the necessary approvals to drive on Californian public roads.
Dubbed a "giant toaster-shaped vehicle" by the Washington Post, the 700kg, battery-powered Nuro putters along at low speed and can carry around 110kg of cargo.
"Our vehicles are equipped with dozens of sensors," Ferguson says.
"We use both short and long-range cameras - similar to the eyes we have - and lidar [laser imaging, detection and ranging] to shoot lasers and create a 3D point cloud of the whole environment. We also use radar to get distance and velocity measurements for other vehicles."
Thermal cameras are also in the mix, used to detect the heat signature of people and animals - particularly at night.
"And we also have microphones for emergency vehicles or siren detection," Ferguson says.
The plethora of complementary sensors adds up to a system that can maintain a detailed virtual map of the Nuro's world at all times. The fully-automated technology saw the US Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration grant Nuro a special exemption from the usual requirement for side mirrors.
Nuro's flexible design has also appealed. Domino's could make one of its two compartments a pizza warmer and the other a fridge for drinks, for example. There's also the option to sub-compartmentalise with lockers, so you can't swipe another customer's order.
One Nuro observer called its lineup of anchor clients "a rebel alliance against Amazon".
Ferguson won't comment on that, but he does note that Amazon - which has trials for drones and other autonomous delivery technology - may loom large in e-commerce, it only accounts for a small fraction of the total US$5.6 trillion US retail market, 90 per cent of which is still local and in-person.
"We're trying to really energise local commerce", the Kiwi expat says. He sees fleets of Nuros giving firms an affordable delivery mechanism for goods sold online.
And he also reels off stats on how it's good for the planet, and your time.
"Every year in the US there are 93 billion personal vehicle trips that people take for shopping and running errands," he says.
"So almost 100 billion trips where you really don't need anyone in those vehicles at all.
"You get your time back, and it's faster and safer and more sustainable. It's a massive societal benefit. And it's a huge market."
Air NZ engine problems mean just over half of flights are departing on time.