Ford and Domino's team up for self-driving pizza deliveries

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Mashable

BY BRETT WILLIAMS
11 HOURS AGO

Would you walk outside of your home to collect a pizza from a driverless car?

Dominoes and Ford are exploring this possibility on the streets of Ann Arbor, Michigan over the next several weeks. The companies announced today they're partnering to deploy driverless cars that will deliver pizzas to randomly selected customers.

The vehicles used in the project are Ford Fusion Hybrid Autonomous Cars and will be equipped with a heated compartment accessible by the passenger side rear window. When the customer walks up to the window, they'll have to enter a numerical code into a tablet to get access to the pizza.

The cars will still have human drivers behind the wheel and will primarily be tasked with collecting a whole new stream of on-road data about the delivery process, according to Ford VP of Autonomous Vehicles and Electrification Sherif Marakby. The partners are most interested in understanding the last 50 feet of the delivery experience, when the pizza finally reaches its destination.

Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/08/29/ford-dominoes-self-driving-pizza-delivery/?utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29&utm_cid=Mash-Prod-RSS-Feedburner-All-Partial&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed#xHPbDlUQhmqL

[pangaia]

1. Dominoes pizza are too greasy..

[Not Ruth]

3. That is a broad stroke considering that you can probably come up with a thousand different Domino

Pizzas

[Not Ruth]

2. Tip free/robbery free delivery is a win/win

[MissMillie]

10. Those drivers rely on those tips

Many of them make less than minimum wage (like a waitress).

For robbery-free, I'd go w/ no cash transactions. Credit/Debit only.

I deliver pizza for a living. I admit, I'm in a small town, pretty much crime free.... but take away my tips and I'm sunk.

[longship]

4. Ford/Dominoes autonomous pizza delivery vehicles upside down all over Ann Arbor.

Thin, horrible Dominoes pizzas all over the roadway. (That's okay; they're inedible anyway. Best place for them.)

Can hardly wait for my pizza delivery during the height of Michigan winter. They'll be autonomous Dominoes delivery vehicles in the Ann Arbor tree tops, somehow appropriate.

Just say no to so-called autonomous vehicles. Keep them off my roads.

[customerserviceguy]

8. In my opinion

chances are, autonomous vehicles would probably drive better than the people I used to work around in New Jersey, and live around in New York. They didn't give me any sort of test when I moved to NY ten years ago (in fairness, that didn't happen when I moved to SC a couple of months ago), and it sort of shows in the NYC area. When my family moved to WA state in 1969, they gave a driving test so stringent that my father, who had been driving for nearly three decades, failed it the first time. I failed it, too, when I turned 16, and had to re-test a couple of weeks later. My Mom and sister lorded it over us that they passed on the first time!

[longship]

13. The driverless car is a Matrix wet dream, for now.

Only a mad person would advocate for them without an infrastructure to back it up.

I consider where I live now, where there is real winter (and damned many unpaved roads), and where I also lived for a decade, SOCAL, where there are eight lane interstates going over mountain passes which are overloaded with eighteen wheelers, and yes get closed during real winter weather. They're white knuckle scary to drive even in the summer. BTW, ever consider what it takes to close down an eight lane Interstate highway?

Just keep the driverless vehicles off my roads and we'll be fine.

[customerserviceguy]

14. While I admit

there will be problems with driverless vehicles, some day, they will be as reliable as most other things we take for granted as being dependable. It may or may not be within my lifetime, but if I'm lucky enough to turn eighty and the technology is perfected, I might very well want to have one.

[longship]

15. But there are some areas where you never want driverless vehicles.

For instance, where I live in the midst of the Manistee National Forest, where there are few paved roads and real winters happen. Keep the fucking autonomous vehicles out of here!

Also, one argument is for driverless eighteen wheelers. That's not going to work, especially over mountain passes where you need real intelligence behind the wheel to prevent utter catastrophe. Driving the Grapevine (Interstate 5 -- Tejon pass) in SoCal is fucking scary enough without dumb technology being in control of huge multi ton vehicles. It's an eight lane Interstate which is amongst the scariest drives I've ever made. The downhill part is jaw droppingly white knuckling. And half the vehicles on a crowded four lanes are big semi-trucks. There are run out lanes all over the place. Only a mad person would put an autonomous vehicle on that very major Interstate.

[customerserviceguy]

16. I admit

that some scenarios will be much more challenging than others, but a hundred years from now, future generations will wonder why we drove our own vehicles.

[longship]

17. Where's my jet pack and my nuclear powered vacuum cleaner!

And I desperately need a Rosie the house cleaning robot (Jetsons).

[customerserviceguy]

18. While "The Jetsons" vision of the future never really came true

A fair amount of "Star Trek" is already here. Some prognosticators are better than others, my science fiction reading history confirms that. I like to find old books that were about predicting the future (Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock", for instance) and see how much of it they got right, and how much of it they really were off base on.

[jcmaine72]

5. Would I walk outside of my home to collect a pizza from a driverless car?

Only a night in which I wasn't planning on watching Christine or The Car.

[NBachers]

11. The Car!

[Midnight Writer]

6. My buddy's mom was run over by a Dominoes' car 20 years ago.

It was a case of the teenage delivery boy being told his pay would be docked if he did not deliver "In Thirty Minutes Or Less!".

She got an undisclosed settlement, bought a house, and now is in her late nineties, albeit in a wheelchair.

Doesn't make me confidant that such an irresponsible corporation is experimenting with new unproven technologies on our streets.

Ferchrissakes, Dominoes, just bite the bullet, hire real people and give them a decent wage and safe working conditions.

P. S. Someone should perhaps look into the finances of the people on the Ann Arbor City Council. I can't imagine something like this being approved without some kind of buy-in.

[customerserviceguy]

7. All this science

for a really lousy pizza. Of course, smartphones are used for dumb-ass things, too...

[MissMillie]

9. Who says illegal immigrants are taking our jobs?

seriously...

and we're all so connected to our computers and tablets and phones that we can't let a delivery person bring our pizza to the door and talk to them and then tip them?

[NBachers]

12. I worked for Domino's in Michigan. The owners were the worst abusive sneering pigs I ever worked for

Sorry, Domino's will never be on my order list.