Matan Yemini, CEO, LMX: Six months inside auto-parts delivery: steady, dense demand, yet a third of runs carry one stop and drivers wait 45% of their shift. Industrial delivery has a utilization problem, and robots will inherit it.
By Matan Yemini, CEO, LMX
We spent six months inside industrial delivery, mostly auto parts. We worked from a 13-driver New Jersey distributor's route files, drove three weeks as a contract driver for a national distributor, and ran more than 100 gig routes ourselves in Texas and New Jersey. Utilization was the problem everywhere, and no robot was involved.
The demand is steady and dense. One distributor runs about 150 drops a day to about 100 shops, all inside ten miles. Orders come in during business hours, every working day, and the shop needs the part now: a car on the lift is a bay that can't bill. Median time from order to the shop's door was 43 minutes.
The vehicles still run empty:
About a third of that distributor's runs carried a single stop. A $146 set of brake shoes and a $30 horn each got their own van.
Over 13 weeks, drivers spent 45% of their shift waiting at the warehouse for the next order.
Driving for the national distributor, we delivered to the same shop four times in one day, each order on its own run. One was a second 35-mile trip for a $5.88 seal.
A single-part hotshot almost never came in under $20.
Gig platforms don't fix it. Across our routes, the median offer was a single drop and nobody sequenced the loads. Twenty of 25 orders listed their weight as "0–99 lbs." The platforms sell the trip, not the route.
Dispatch runs on one person's judgment, and none of it is written down.
On paper, this is easier demand for a robot than meal delivery. It has fixed pickup and drop-off points, someone at the counter during business hours, and a part that is usually small: at one distributor, the median order weighed 1.6 kg and 55% weighed under 2.5 kg. But it's split across thousands of distributors, each dispatching its own runs to sites that each have their own door, gate and dock. No platform pulls it together the way the meal apps do for restaurants.
Industrial delivery doesn't have a demand problem. It has a utilization problem, and robots will inherit it.
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