It’s a Canadian first: Ontario grocer Loblaw had agreed sometime in 2020 with tech company Gatik, which has offices in Toronto and the San Francisco suburbs, to test warehouse-to-warehouse delivery vehicles. Two years later, Gatik and Loblaw will remove the guard who was previously in the driver’s seat.

Technically, this means that the trucks that Loblaw uses to make the so-called intermediate delivery, either from one warehouse to another or from one warehouse to the grocery store, go from a limited Level 4 to just a Level 4. The next step will be to take this to level 5 which is fully autonomous.

This is a big step forward for autonomous driving. This is all the more impressive given that Gatik says it has made no fewer than 150,000 deliveries in autonomous mode over the past two years, summer and winter alike. And his success rate is 100 percent, no less.

In addition to this spotless record, Gatik has passed various audits imposed by both Loblaw and the Ontario government. Ontario started a 10-year pilot project in 2016 to test autonomous driving on its territory.

The two partners in this project are also working with local authorities, police forces and firefighters, among others, to ensure everyone understands the technology and is ready to respond if necessary.

Loblaw isn’t Gatik’s only business partner either. In the United States, Gatik already has fully autonomous trucks on the road through an agreement with Walmart and another with a pulp and paper company called KBX.

Gatik is quite ambitious, having raised $144 million in investment funding since its inception in 2016. The company is also backed financially by a Loblaw venture capital fund.

We would be very excited to launch such a project in Quebec…

About the author

Alain McKenna has been involved in electronics, technology, automotive, media and finance for 20 years. He has written for the major daily newspapers in Quebec, is the author of four books and speaks regularly on Quebec television and radio on a variety of current affairs.