Is the time of the pizza delivery driver over? Ford and Domino’s Pizza will test a pizzas delivery service in Michigan. This test will be used to study the behavior of consumers in the presence of a driverless vehicle.
The test will occur in the Ann Arbor area of Michigan, reports TechCrunch.
Both companies want to observe their customers’ reaction to the unmanned vehicle.
“How will customers react to coming outside to get their food?” Domino’s president Russell Weiner said in a statement, “We need to make sure the interface is clear and simple.”
A code to retrieve his pizza
For Ford, it is a way to test its driver-less vehicles in real conditions.
“We do this ethnographic research in parallel with the development of the technology itself. We will thus learn things from the everyday that we did not envisage. And we want to have the opportunity, from a timing point of view, to incorporate these changes in our vehicles or their interface to improve interactions with consumers,” says company President Russell Weiner.
“The majority of our questions are about the last 50 feet of the delivery experience,” Weiner told reporters last week.
In practice, the customer will order their pizza as usual. A mobile alert will inform them as soon as the driver is in front of his door … with an autonomous vehicle parked in front of his home as a deliveryman. Inside the delivery car, the customer will find his pizza kept in a bag to keep it warm. To recover the pie, the customer will only have to give a code provided at the time of the purchase.
$1 billion investment
For these tests, Domino’s will randomly choose among the customers who regularly order pizzas. However, the delivery vehicle will not be completely autonomous. For safety reasons, a human will always be behind the wheel. He will be ready to take control of the vehicle at any time in case of problems. Conclusion of this unusual project, the delivery of the future should not go through the drones.
If Tesla is already considering self-driving electric trucks for deliveries , the unmanned vehicle sector is moving towards passenger transport. For its part, Ford announced last February its intention to invest $ 1 billion (or 940 million euros) over five years in artificial intelligence and robotics . A strategic investment to complete its autonomous car project by 2021.
