Domino’s has announced that it will begin using self-driving vehicles for pizza delivery, starting in Houston.
Marketing tactic or not, the new technology is certainly bound to attract some curious buyers. The innovative pizza delivery method was developed in partnership with Nuro, an autonomous driving tech startup that was founded by two prominent figures in the self-driving car project of Google. The team also includes engineers from various other autonomous driving projects such as Waymo, Uber, GM, Tesla, and Apple.
On Domino’s side, the pizza company will first test the autonomous vehicles, Nuro’s R2, with orders from either the app or the website. Customers will be able to select whether they want their pizza orders to be delivered via self-driving vehicles or not, with an opt-in button available at the check-out page. A PIN will also be given to the customers which they can use to open the doors to the vehicles and get their orders inside.
Surprisingly, this is actually Domino’s second attempt to fulfill orders via autonomous vehicles. In 2017, the company ran a limited pilot with automaker Ford, mostly in order to familiarize itself with self-driving delivery service.
