EVwire brief: Autolane has announced that it is now running its autonomous delivery service in Austin, where a 13-car fleet of Tesla Model Ys is handling supervised restaurant deliveries.
In a comment to EVwire, Autolane Co-Founder & CEO Ben Seidl explained that autonomous cars are already a good fit for deliveries.
"Autonomous vehicles are excellent at thinking and driving safely. Next is Autolane giving them skills to get things done. Errands like picking up your groceries and dropping off a return will soon be done with personal AVs on the Autolane platform."
The Autolane team at the DRIVE AI Demo Day at UC Berkeley's Richmond Field Station.
TSO, a Chinese restaurant in Austin, is the first stop on the route, with AI firm Nash handling the order-integration side. "We plan to have additional major retail brands that will be coming on board later this year to use our autonomous delivery platform for last-mile delivery," Seidl told Forbes.
Atlanta and Phoenix came online recently too, pushing Autolane's footprint to ten shopping centers total, with REIT landlords Federal Realty, Jamestown, and Macerich joining Simon Properties on the roster. Two more cities are already penciled in: Los Angeles in September, and Miami a month earlier.
Autolane’s showcase at the 2026 ICSC in Las Vegas.
Autolane builds the software behind all of it, what Seidl calls "air traffic control" for private curbs: a platform that tells a property which autonomous vehicles are arriving, guides each one, whether it's a car, a delivery bot, or a drone, to the right spot, then triggers the handoff.
Founded in Palo Alto in 2024, Autolane raised $7.4 million last December and says its system has at least halved pickup times at the Simon Center properties where it's already deployed. Seidl has called that partnership proof Autolane is "solving the critical 'last fifty feet' challenge at scale."
Autolane’s launch in TX includes a fleet of Tesla Model Y units.
Context:
Autolane struck a separate deal with Hevo earlier this year to fold wireless charging into its delivery vehicles, so they can top up power between runs without anyone plugging in a cable. The Miami expansion lands in a market already warming up to autonomous vehicles: Tesla launched Robotaxi service there in July, its first market outside Texas and California. Autolane isn't the only startup betting on AV-support infrastructure either. Aseon Labs raised $10 million in June for automated robotaxi "pit stops," a different piece of the same problem.
The market Autolane is chasing is growing fast. Autonomous last-mile delivery pulled in $26.6 billion worldwide last year, a figure Statista expects to clear $50 billion by 2028. Seidl told Forbes the market has "roughly 15 such players today, but is likely growing to around 50 within three years."
Curb chaos is a genuinely funny problem to have this early, but if automakers actually ship unsupervised self-driving later this year like Seidl expects, someone is going to own the last fifty feet before it becomes a real one.
Source: Forbes
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