Ford employees learning how to run a self-driving car service could do a lot worse. That the city's warm, mostly sunny weather won't mess with self-driving sensors, and that Florida has some of the most permissive self-driving car regulations in the country, definitely doesn't hurt either. Officials also like that Miami is home to plenty of businesses that deliver, and its population is already comfortable going online to order a new mop, or package of diapers, or, you know, a pizza. (The roads analytics company Inrix ranks the metro the 10th most congested on the globe.) "We actually want to operate in some of the tougher areas that the technology will need to be developed for," says Sherif Marakby, Ford’s VP of autonomous vehicles and electrification. In the meantime, execs say they're intrigued about the prospect of using traffic-choked Miami as a living, breathing testing ground for autonomous vehicle tech. That means moving goods, moving people, and moving both at the same time-after all, the business model has to allow the carmaker to recoup the self-driving-truckloads of money it's spending to develop the technology.įord says it will begin testing autonomous vehicles in another American city in 2018. Occurred on Septem/ Las Vegas, Nevada, USA'Just a fun evening ordering dominos that arrived in their experimental self-driving car.'Contact lice. "In this early stage of AV technology, as far as the business is concerned, running the vehicle at really high utilization rate for most of the day is going to be key," says Jim Farley, Ford's president of global markets. And soon enough, the very same car delivering your groceries in the morning could deliver you to a bar at night.
How will employees know when to load your pizza into a driverless vehicle? Where will they put it-in the trunk? How will they know the car has all the pizzas it needs for a particular trip and is ready to start its delivery rounds? Are customers willing to walk out to a curb to meet their fresh pie? Or do they want a pizza delivery guy to come all the way to the door, the way it works now? How often will a driverless car need to return to a maintenance center for tweaking or gas? How often will the cars need to get the all-important sensors that help them “see” re-calibrated by humans? How many deliveries will happen before the car desperately needs pizza bits vacuumed from its nooks and crannies?Īfter this year, though, the Ford cars testing in driverless mode and the ones actually making deliveries should become one and the same. It will be on maintaining and operating the armada of robot delivery cars that get your stuff from A to, well, to you.Īs part of partnerships with Domino’s and the on-demand delivery company Postmates, Ford will use its first few months in Miami to study how people interact with driverless deliveries, from the store stockroom to customers' front doors. The focus there won’t be on getting you from A to B. Which is why the company announced today that it will begin to test autonomous vehicles and build its first operations terminal in Miami, Florida.
That year, Ford wants to launch a self-driving taxi service, and it wants to start making deliveries with driverless vehicles.īut before the Detroit automaker does any of that, it needs to figure out how to run a fleet. The growing demand for great-tasting pizza creates the need for more deliveries, and we look forward to seeing how autonomous delivery can work along with Domino’s existing delivery experts to better support the customers’ needs.If you work on self-driving cars, the cocktail party question people always ask is probably: When will I get to interact with one? For two years now, Ford Motor Company has had an answer- in 2021. This program will allow us to better understand how customers respond to the deliveries, how they interact with the robot and how it affects store operations. “There is still so much for our brand to learn about the autonomous delivery space. “We’re excited to continue innovating the delivery experience for Domino’s customers by testing autonomous delivery with Nuro in Houston,” Dennis Maloney, Domino’s senior vice president and chief innovation officer, said in a statement. Four years later, the company used a self-driving Ford Fusion to deliver pizzas to customers in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 2013, the company tested pizza delivery via drones in the United Kingdom, CNN reported. Department of Transportation last year, Domino’s said in its release.ĭomino’s has experimented with autonomous deliveries before. Nuro’s robot car was the first completely autonomous, human-free on-road delivery vehicle to receive regulatory approval from the U.S. “Customers may also track the vehicle via GPS on their order confirmation page.”
#Dominos autonomous car update
“Customers who are selected will receive text alerts, which will update them on R2′s location and provide them with a unique PIN to retrieve their order,” Domino’s said in its news release.
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