6 November 2026 · Joff Bullock
Introducing Bot, Minimal's first autonomous vehicle
Today we unveil our first autonomous commercial vehicle for last mile logistics.
Bot is a compact electric delivery vehicle. It drives on the road, not the pavement. It's built to get food and parcels to people across towns and cities quickly, quietly and reliably.
Minimal develops both the vehicle and its autonomy technology in-house, with one goal: to change how commercial transport works at scale. We're building a new system for moving goods in every city, and Bot is the next step in that.
Why now
Now is the time to build autonomous vehicles. Progress across the field means new autonomous vehicles can be developed faster than ever.
At Minimal, we're building both the vehicles that our autonomy will run on, and the data engine that will train them. Our model learns on virtual streets in our World Model, and on real ones, from data our vehicles collect on the road every day.
One vehicle, many jobs
Bot is built for the short, frequent trips that keep a town running. Hot food. Small grocery orders. Medical supplies. Parcels.
Its modular storage hold can be configured for different loads. One Bot can carry orders for different businesses, on the same route, in the same run.
So Bot is always moving. It replaces idle vehicles built and operated for one use case and one business at a time. Bot is designed to deliver from anywhere to anywhere, 24/7, so people get what they need, when they need it, at a lower cost per delivery.
Built on the Minimal technology platform
Bot is built on the Minimal technology platform, a fully vertically integrated, software-defined vehicle platform, at our factory in West London.
Bot's driverless mechatronic systems are designed and integrated by Minimal, alongside the autonomy stack. Sensors and vision systems go in from the start, not bolted on later. That gives us design ownership of the whole system, end to end.
The self-driving model
Bot is driven by our own self-driving model. It reads the street, makes decisions and drives the vehicle. It practises in our World Model, a digital twin of real streets that generates training data quickly in highly realistic virtual environments. It trains on Isambard, the supercomputer at the University of Bristol, through our compute grant.
With vehicle and model built on one platform, we can develop a safe autonomous model for Bot, and do it at pace.
Every Bot runs in FleetOS, our next generation fleet management platform. It works alongside driven vehicles, ours and other manufacturers', on the same routes.
Safe by design
Bot carries 20 times less kinetic energy than a car. Small and light means far less force on the street.
A separate safety controller sits beneath the self-driving model. It enforces speed limits and can always override our AI, ensuring Bot can rapidly be brought to a controlled stop at the kerbside.
Bot will begin on defined routes under remote supervision.
Autonomy you can deploy
We don't think autonomy should be a moonshot. It should be a vehicle you can deploy and trust.
That's why Bot is part of a system, not a one-off. The vehicle, the self-driving model and FleetOS are built to work together, from the first trial to every route after it.
"Our ambition is to scale autonomy into cities around the world. The UK, Europe and the US come first. Everything we're building, from the vehicles to the World Model and the training pipelines behind it, is designed to work in any market," says Liam Sill, CTO at Minimal.
What's next
Bot starts on-road trials in Q2 2027. The first customer pilots follow in Q4 2027.
You can see Bot for the first time at Micromobility America in San Francisco on 11 and 12 November. Find us on stand C7 at the Palace of Fine Arts.
From there, Bot heads to the Robotics Showcase at Slush in Helsinki.
Come and say hello.