Six years ago, I sat in the Google self-driving project's Firefly vehicle — which I described, at the time, as a "little gumdrop on wheels" — and let it ferry me around a course in Mountain View.
Nuro doesn't have a typical Silicon Valley origin story. It didn't emerge after a long, slow slog from a suburban garage or through a flash of insight in a university laboratory.
Nuro's autonomous vehicles (AVs) don't have a human driver on board. There's no room in the narrow chassis for a driver's seat, no need for a steering wheel, accelerator or brake pedals.
Pandemic pizza was definitely a thing. U.S. consumers forked out a record-breaking $14bn to have pizza delivered to their doors in 2020, and nearly half of that was spent with one brand: Domino's.
The first sign that your town is about to welcome a horde of Nuro robots will be the appearance of a fleet of human-driven Toyota Priuses modified with cameras, lidars and radars.