Ford (F, Financial) is expanding its self-driving program to the busy streets of Miami, where the carmaker will be testing its autonomous technology to build a strong business model by holding pilot programs with Domino’s Pizza (DPZ, Financial) and Postmates. The company will deploy its self-driving vehicles to test a variety of services, including delivering pizza and parcels to customers. The idea is to study the behavior and requirement of people and accordingly develop the robot car technology. Ford is confident that its self-driving technology will make roads safer and driving more efficient.
The plan ahead
Ford’s self-driving vehicles have already arrived at Miami last week, and testing is in progress. The Blue Oval will be testing two types of autonomous cars. The first type would be the blue-and-white research vehicles that will have hardware and software technology by Argo, which is an autonomous startup supported by Ford. The second type is the self-driving delivery cars, which the company recently set out in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in collaboration with Dominos’s Pizza. Ford is hoping to extend its autonomous offering in the city by deploying “thousands” of self-driving vehicles.
However, Ford has not declared exactly how many autonomous vehicles are running around the roads of North Beach. The Argo research autonomous vehicles are presently driving all over the city and gathering mapping data. Simultaneously, the Domino’s car is being driven by a human driver as Ford wants to learn customer interaction so that it may incorporate relevant features in its autonomous delivery vehicle. For security reasons, Ford is keeping safety drivers behind all autonomous vehicles that the company is operating for the time being.
Separately, the second largest American automaker has also built a service center for providing services to its autonomous vehicles near downtown Miami. The terminal will be the home base for Ford’s autonomous vehicles for parking, data transfer and a place where these vehicles can have the sensors cleaned and regulated.
The company is planning to build and test the autonomous system, and develop a dedicated profitable business line of autonomous vehicles operating across the globe. The company’s recently acquired autonomous technology start-up, Argo, concentrates on building and testing self-driving vehicles.
The pilots with Domino's and Postmates are research vehicles with sensors operated by safety engineers. The purpose is to study the regular logistical challenges in providing delivery services by an autonomous vehicles in various places from Ann Arbor, Michigan to the Miami. Sherif Marakby, Ford’s vice president of autonomous vehicles and electrification told Fortune:
“Every city is different and Miami represents a diverse urban, dense environment…We’re testing things like curbside management and customers’ willingness to have the delivery come to their apartment building and having to come down and pick it up.”
Jim Farley, the company’s president for global markets, told Fortune in an interview about Ford’s planned course of action:
“We’re going to test in a number of cities that’s required to launch and be at scale to be able to build a great business in 2021.”
Farley further confirmed that Ford aims “to stand the business up in 2021” and test in various city so that the company can launch autonomous vehicles at scale. Ford proposes to reach out to at least one more city in the current year.
Peer comparison
Ford is doing all that is required to catch up with its aggressive rivals.
The self-driving wing of Google’s (GOOG, Financial) parent Alphabet, Waymo, is preparing to introduce driverless ride-hailing service in Phoenix. General Motors’ (GM, Financial), on the other hand, said that Cruise will roll out robot taxi service in San Francisco. Uber already has the same service offering for picking up passengers in Pittsburgh and Phoenix, while Lyft has joined forces with NuTonomy to come out with a ride-hailing pilot in Boston.
Ford witnessed challenging times last year with sales seeing little improvement and an untimely management shuffles with Jim Hackett replacing Mark Fields as the new CEO of the company. As such, the company could not devote the desired focus on the development of autonomous technology. But now Ford is all set to explore the challenging environment of Miami known for its severe traffic congestion.Ă‚
Disclosure: I do not hold any position in the stocks discussed in this article.
