China Low Speed Automated Driving Industry Alliance (LSAD) and the New Strategy Low Speed Automated Driving Industry Research Institute predicts that by 2025, China’s unmanned delivery vehicle shipments will reach nearly 40,000 units, with sales exceeding 4.5 billion yuan. By 2026, the cumulative shipments are expected to climb to 150,000 units, and are projected to reach 750,000 to 1.05 million units by 2030, forming a market space worth tens of billions of yuan, further empowering logistics cost reduction, service quality improvement, and urban operational efficiency optimization.
In terms of application scenarios, nearly 60% of the unmanned delivery vehicles currently in operation are used in the express delivery industry. With the accelerated growth of other scenarios in the wholesale/retail sector, the application share in the express delivery industry may decline in the future, but its absolute number will still increase.
In terms of vehicle models, medium-sized (5-8m³) and single-compartment vans are the mainstream products, which are currently the best choice to support large-scale commercial use in the express delivery and wholesale/retail industries. They can effectively control costs and adapt to complex urban operating environments while ensuring the necessary cargo space.
In terms of capacity density, China’s unmanned delivery vehicle operation network has covered 31 provinces (municipalities and autonomous regions) and more than 300 cities nationwide. Among them, 12 provinces, including Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Shandong, Henan, and Hebei, have achieved 100% coverage of all prefecture-level cities. Meanwhile, the scale of city-level deployment is also expanding rapidly, becoming an important benchmark for measuring the maturity of the operational network. The New Strategy Low Speed Automated Driving Industry Research Institute predicts that by 2026, the number of cities with 500 or more unmanned delivery vehicles in operation is expected to increase to 50.
The practice of unmanned delivery in China is unfolding at an unprecedented speed and breadth, rapidly evolving from a closed-scene technology demonstration “test field” into a “new infrastructure” deeply embedded in the capillaries of the national economy.
In the future, the development trend of China’s unmanned delivery industry can be summarized as large-scale, lightweight, diversified, systematic, globalized, and sustainable. Among these, lightweight is a prerequisite for achieving large-scale; large-scale provides the foundation for diversification; diversification and systematicity promote each other; globalization is the expansion of mature models; and sustainability is the ultimate constraint and goal of all development, determining how far the industry can go.
