The United States Postal Service (USPS) released a report last week stating that the agency plans to integrate self-driving tech into its fleet of 228,000 vehicles. In partnership with the University of Michigan, USPS plans to build an Autonomous Rural Delivery Vehicle and start using it on 28,000 rural routes as early as 2025.
Autonomous delivery trucks would be largely beneficial to the postal service because it would free up drivers for other tasks such as sorting mail while the truck drives itself in between stops. Additionally, drivers would not have to deal with the extra time of repeatedly parking, turning off and restarting the vehicle, which the report says would create “small but cumulatively significant time savings.”