Meituan’s Autonomous Delivery Vehicles: Deployment, Operations, and Future Plans

Since the second half of 2020, the autonomous driving sector has attracted intense attention, especially in the high‑profile autonomous taxi space. In contrast, low‑speed autonomous delivery has been progressing quietly but steadily.

Meituan launched its unmanned delivery vehicles in early 2020, initially serving a few communities in Shunyi, Beijing. By April 2021, the service area expanded to more than 20 communities, delivering over 30,000 orders, primarily fresh groceries.

According to Meituan’s Vice President of Smart Transportation, Xia Huaxia, the pandemic in early 2020 accelerated the rollout, prompting the team to fast‑track development and begin field trials in February 2020, a full 11 months ahead of schedule.

By April of the reporting year, Meituan’s Shunyi fleet comprised nearly 100 vehicles, with about 20 operating continuously and the rest used for testing. The fleet has completed more than 30,000 orders, handling 5‑10 orders per vehicle per day (roughly 20+ orders per vehicle on average) with delivery times of 30‑40 minutes.

Meituan’s strategy combines human riders for the first and last‑mile tasks with Level‑4 autonomous vehicles for the middle, open‑road segment, enabling operation in adverse weather conditions while leveraging human flexibility for complex end‑point environments.

The autonomous driving team in Beijing has grown from around 100 members in 2018 to over 300 engineers, including more than 40 PhDs, many with experience at Apple, Zoox, Baidu, etc. The team is organized into perception, localization, prediction‑planning, control, and high‑definition mapping groups.

Technical achievements include nearly 500 pending patents, close to 100 test vehicles, and 300,000 km of real‑world road‑testing data. While occasional remote interventions are needed, the team aims to eliminate on‑board safety operators within the year.

Hardware costs for each delivery robot are currently about ¥500,000 (≈ $70,000), featuring three LiDARs, high‑precision positioning, and a powerful industrial computer. Meituan expects sensor and chip prices to fall, eventually reducing vehicle cost to a few tens of thousands of yuan, making large‑scale commercial deployment feasible.

Meituan does not plan to enter the autonomous taxi market in the short term, focusing instead on the commercially viable delivery niche. However, the technology stack is shared, and future expansion into autonomous taxis remains possible.

Beyond ground vehicles, Meituan is also exploring aerial drone delivery, aiming for an integrated “air‑ground” logistics system that combines unmanned cars, drones, and human riders to meet growing demand for food, groceries, and other goods.

Overall, Meituan’s rapid deployment of autonomous delivery robots demonstrates how a large platform can achieve commercial scale in a relatively small, high‑impact scenario, while positioning itself for broader logistics applications.