DHL Parcel Germany and Smart have extended their pilot project enabling Smart drivers to get parcels delivered directly to their car trunks to Cologne following a successful pilot in Stuttgart that started in the autumn.
Over the last few months, the partners have worked together to develop and test a solution which ensures high security standards for products and vehicles. After Stuttgart and Cologne, the car trunk delivery service will be further expanded to Bonn and Berlin next year.
The joint solution from Smart and DHL Paket is based on a smartphone app, with the Smart driver and the DHL parcel courier using specially designed apps. The vehicle owners use the Smart app to generate a single-use transaction authorisation number (TAN) which they enter in the “c/o” box when entering their delivery address during the order process at an online shop. The only condition is that the vehicle needs to be parked in close proximity to the owner’s home address.
The delivery driver also receives a message about the desired delivery location via the app and gets temporary access to the car trunk to either deposit the parcel or retrieve return shipments. Once the vehicle is closed, the access authorisation is no longer valid. The Smart owner is then informed automatically about the successful delivery via the app.
By attracting participants in each city, DHL Parcel and Smart aim to collect feedback under real-life conditions. The installation of the devices needed to participate in the pilot will be conducted at local distributors, with Smart taking over the costs.
"As an innovation leader in the parcel industry, we are pursuing the goal of developing more and more ideas for the diverse solutions that already exist in order to make receiving and shipping of parcels even easier and enable individual monitoring according to customer requirements. Together with Smart, we are using our know-how in order to develop another attractive offer for a young, very online-affine target group,” Marc Hitschfeld, senior vice president Consumers at DHL Parcel, said.
Daniel Deparis, Head of the Smart lab, added: "With the new service, we are expanding the range of use of our vehicle and thus offer a mobility concept that goes beyond the car, which is also the beginning of our offensive for more urban quality of life."
The pilot project in cooperation with Smart follows a similar project that DHL Parcel Germany successfully conducted in cooperation with Audi and Amazon last year.
