Get ready for more autonomous vehicles to start delivering Domino's pizza
Autonomous cars are now bringing pizza pies instead of groceries to customer's homes.
On Monday, the self-driving company Nuro announced a partnership with Domino's Pizza in Houston. Nuro has been dropping off Kroger groceries in the Texas city since earlier this year. Kroger uses the self-driving vehicles to haul grocery bags to online shoppers in other cities like Phoenix.
Now Houston residents can order a pizza through the Domino's app and then track the pizza as it makes its way to their home without a driver in sight. Once someone makes an order, they're given a PIN code to unlock the compartment on the Nuro vehicle and retrieve their pizza from the vehicle. Remember, there's no delivery person to bring it to the doorway.
The pizza will arrive in Nuro's R2 vehicle, a custom-built autonomous vehicle designed for delivering food and other items. This isn't a passenger car with a modified back seat -- this vehicle was made with autonomous deliveries in mind.
The pilot program and testing is expected to kick off with "select customers" later this year. Domino's has been testing autonomous pizza deliveries in Miami with Ford's Argo AI self-driving cars. But that program involves safety drivers and humans still in the car.
This is a true driverless pizza delivery experience. Eat up.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
