Ford Motor Co. is taking its driverless delivery trials to South Beach to continue testing consumer response to receiving pizzas and packages from the back of a robot ride.
The automaker is deploying a handful of delivery vehicles on the clogged byways of Miami and Miami Beach to serve up Domino’s pizza, groceries and other cargo. They’ll be dressed up to look driverless -- and will interact with consumers robotically -- but they’ll be driven by humans for now while the company tests things like how employees stock them and whether consumers will walk to the curb to fetch their packages by hand.
“We are headed to Florida to test and prove out our business model,” Sherif Marakby, Ford’s vice president of autonomous vehicles and electrification, wrote in a Medium post. “What we learn from this customer experience research will be applied to the design of our purpose-built self-driving vehicle that we plan to launch in 2021.”
Packages Vs. People
The Miami experiment, which expands on a test Ford conducted in Ann Arbor last year, is a sign the carmaker still sees driverless package delivery as the key to the self-driving future. As rivals including Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo and General Motors Co. are aiming to ferry human cargo without drivers this year and next, carmakers including Ford, Toyota Motor Corp. and Nissan Motor Co. see transporting goods autonomously as a quicker path to profitability.
Ford still intends to eventually offer a ride-hailing service in the autonomous vehicles it will debut in three years, but the company is focusing first on delivery because of its history providing commercial trucks and vans to businesses. The model also makes sense given the rapid rise of e-commerce.
“Delivering goods with autonomous vehicle technology is something very, very new,” Jim Farley, Ford’s president of global markets, said in an interview. “We’ve learned how complicated it can be. It’s a less mature space and it’s also kind of natural to us.”
Ford’s Chief Executive Officer Jim Hackett has struggled to convince Wall Street that the automaker has a winning plan for embracing the autonomous age. Ford’s share price has fallen 13 percent this year, while rival GM has eked out a 0.3 percent gain.
Trial Timing
The Miami Domino’s test using Ford Fusions began last week and will run for eight weeks. Next month, Ford will also begin a trial with Postmates, a startup it’s partnered with that delivers groceries, take-out food and other goods.