While it only opened its doors last May, the Beijing-based company Neolix is experiencing impressive development, reports the Bloomberg agency. In the past two months, the startup that manufactures autonomous delivery vehicles has received orders to produce more than 200 vehicles while before January it had produced only 125 in total. Neolix now has a clientele like the e-commerce giant Alibaba which aims to reduce the physical contact of its employees with clients, especially due to the Covid-19 epidemic, and also to compensate for the lack of deliverers arising quarantines imposed in certain parts of the country.

 If the founder of the startup, Yu Enyuan, is to believe, driverless vans are ordered to transport medical equipment to hospitals, disinfect the streets and deliver food to customers. He notes that the public is beginning to "understand that such vehicles can carry out tasks when the situation is too risky for humans." Like the autonomous vehicle industry in China, the service economy of the digital industry is also experiencing strong demand as customers try to minimize the number of non-imperative physical contacts between the people.

 This trend seen in China could well predict the near future of Europeans given the evolution of the figures for the coronavirus epidemic around the world.