Some people love self-checkout lanes at the grocery store. And for the next few weeks in Ann Arbor, Mich., those same kinds of people will likely love that Domino’s will deliver pizzas in a Ford driverless vehicle. It’s a really clever way these two companies are marketing themselves while at the same time beginning the process of normalizing people to a future of transportation that most people still have difficulty envisioning.
“Society is, in essence, completely unprepared for the complexities of the transformative change that is ahead in the automotive, mobility space,” says Bryan Reimer, who studies autonomous vehicles and human factors at MIT. “Does the pizza delivery man need to be there? That’s just one of the many hundreds of questions we don’t know.”
Which is why Ford says understanding pizza delivery is crucial to its future. “We don’t want to wait until we have autonomous vehicle technology all ready to launch to start understanding these businesses, so we’re doing things in parallel,” says Sherif Marakby, Ford’s head of autonomous and electric vehicles.
Maraby believes Ford, which has promised fully autonomous robocars by 2021, has to learn from experiments like this, and factors that its engineers perhaps haven’t even thought of. Things like, are people prepared to walk to the curb for pizza? Will they try to leave a tip in the robot car (definitely not required)? Will they rest pizza boxes on the car’s roof and block its sensors? Do they freak out if their code to open the window doesn’t work, or if there’s a problem with their order? Ford will then modify its vehicles, software, and operations before bringing its promised driverless car to market by 2021.
Domino’s is also delivering pies with sidewalk drones in Hamburg, Germany. San Francisco and London are grappling with regulations for those rolling robots, designed to wander sidewalks with takeout or cold beers on board. Amazon, UPS, and 7-Eleven are all testing drone deliveries for everything from groceries to slurpees.
Ford’s not the only player investigating this question. Uber and Google spinoff Waymo are offering people rides in their autonomous cars in Pittsburgh and Phoenix, respectively, to see how they use the vehicles. Virginia Tech Transportation Institution created an unintentional internet sensation when it sent a van onto the streets with a driver disguised as a seat, an effort to see how the public reacts to a car with no one inside.