Last Wednesday, an announcement of joining hands, had been made by Ford, Postmates and Walmart. Three of the companies will now be joining forces to start grocery delivery service in Miami through self-driving vehicles.
After recently joining Postmates, to get thorough understanding of interaction between autonomous delivery van and people behavior of taking out meals, now with the current progress of delivering grocery items through Self-driven vehicles, Ford moved a step ahead. Also, since start of this year, Ford has already been testing its driver less vehicles in Miami.
To keep the food items fresh, Ford will not only modify its autonomous vehicles but will also be experimenting with different types of vehicle, as stated the officials. Experiments will also be performed for user experience of picking up the ordered items from a totally driverless van, delivery of multiple orders in a single trip and other likely scenarios which could be happened in the field.
For coming up with the money spinning idea of uniting driverless cars with grocery delivery industry, Ford is not the first one as a deal has already been done between San Francisco based startup Udelv and largest grocery chain of Oklahoma city to supply driverless delivery vehicles.
In Bay Area of San Mateo for high end chain of Drager’s Market, Udlev in its bright orange colored vehicles has already been involved in delivering groceries now expanding to use those vehicles for more mass-market customers of Smart Saver stores, Buy For Less and Uptown Grocery for delivery of wider range of food. In Arizona to deliver groceries to customers through self-driven vehicles, Kroger has joined Nuro. Another announcement of delivering groceries in small fleet of MKZ vehicles has been made by self-driving startup AutoX.
With safety drivers behind the wheels for the time being, Ford’s self-driven cars while collecting HD mapping data, are currently running in autonomous mode all over the Miami.
