Courtesy of Mish.
Your pizza is on the way. Don’t expect the driver to make change because there will not be a driver.
Self-Driving Delivery Vehicle
Driverless Pizzas
Please consider Ford Driverless Cars to Deliver Domino’s Pizzas.
Domino’s Pizza and Ford Motor Co. announced Tuesday that they are teaming up to test how consumers will react to having their orders delivered by an autonomous vehicle, as a number of companies explore how to integrate the emerging technology into their business models.
Ford has promised to build a fully driverless car by 2021, while Domino’s hopes to someday replace all of its drivers with driverless cars.
Starting Wednesday, randomly selected customers in Ann Arbor — which is home to an autonomous vehicle research center and testing facility — will receive their pizza order from a Ford Fusion Hybrid Autonomous research vehicle. The car will be manually driven by a Ford engineer and staffed with researchers to gauge customers’ reactions.
Participants will receive text messages as the self-driving vehicle approaches with instructions on how to retrieve their pizza, which can be unlocked from a “heatwave compartment” inside the vehicle using a unique code.
“We’re interested to learn what people think about this type of delivery,” said Russell Weiner, president of Domino’s USA. “The majority of our questions are about the last 50 feet of the delivery experience. For instance, how will customers react to coming outside to get their food?”
“All of our testing research is focused on our goal to someday make deliveries with self-driving vehicles as seamless and customer-friendly as possible,” Weiner added.
As I have stated repeatedly, millions of driving jobs are going to vanish. This is yet another aspect of what’s coming.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
