What Ford’s pizza delivery experiment says about its autonomy strategy

Enlarge / Domino's Pizza and Ford Motor Co. are launching an industry-first collaboration to understand the role that self-driving vehicles can play in pizza delivery. (credit: Ford)

Ford has teamed up with Domino's Pizza to test automated delivery of pizzas, the Detroit News reports.

Customers who participate in the test will get a text message telling them that their pizza is ready. From there, they'll come out to the curb and punch the last four digits of their phone number into a touchscreen mounted by the rear passenger door. "The window rolls down and the customer grabs their order from a warming oven just inside the window," according to the Detroit News.

But don't get too excited. This isn't a fully self-driving car, although it will have a full complement of self-driving sensors, including a lidar on the roof. There will be a driver hidden behind tinted windows in the driver's seat.

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