Robot cars are being tested on the streets of Wembley to see if they can deliver groceries to your home from the supermarket.

A 12-month trial run began on Monday (April 17) at the Asda store in Park Royal delivering to a catchment area of 72,000 households including neighbourhoods around Wembley and Alperton.

But the self-drive vehicles aren’t actually running by themselves yet. The year-long trial to see if the technology can work is being carried out by human drivers and delivery workers from the store who unload the groceries at the front-door.

Legislation is going through Parliament before the “robot cars” can be let loose on our streets.

“This is a trial run to see how the technology can work,” an Asda spokesman explained. “A trained safety officer is manually driving the car to see how it would fit in with our deliveries.”

The grocery giant has a deal with the Wayve self-driving vehicle company to run the UK’s largest “autonomous grocery home shopping delivery” trial.

The robot vehicles have joined the existing delivery operation at Park Royal with the technical capability using sat nav and other high-tech gadgets to drive themselves to shoppers’ homes.  

Customers place their orders online as usual, choosing a delivery slot — and could be randomly selected to have their orders delivered in a self-driving vehicle.

Asda’s eCommerce senior vice president Simon Gregg said: “We believe autonomous technology is shaping the future of grocery deliveries. So we’re trialling this technology to understand how it can help our store deliver to customers’ doors.”

But deliveries have to follow the Highway Code, with technology capable of stopping at crossings and traffic lights, the company assures.

An “incident management” team is on hand in case of a road accident, where the driver on the trial run can exchange insurance details with another driver if necessary.

What happens after the 12-month trial if robot cars get the green light hasn’t been worked out yet — that is yet to be decided by MPs at Westminster.

This is the first trial in the UK using “machine learning” to train the automated driving software to “learn from experience” how to drive in any environment. It isn’t confined by pre-defined routes, but has the capability of driving anywhere in its urban domain, even to places it’s never been to before.

The Park Royal store is the first to test the technology, monitoring the road to identify potential hazards to make on-the-spot safety decisions — just like humans.