Postmates and Ford Partner on Driverless Delivery Pilot

The carmaker and Postmates — a company that connects consumers with drivers to deliver their groceries, take-out and other purchases — will team up this year on a pilot program that explores how self-driving tech could change the delivery experience.

The experiment, which will use human drivers for now, will help Ford better understand how an autonomous delivery system could work, especially since customers will have to walk out and fetch their orders themselves. Once fully autonomous vehicles are developed, deployed and regulated, this kind of on-demand delivery could eventually go driver-free.

“In the future, when a consumer uses Postmates to place a purchase — whether for groceries, takeout or other goods — a self-driving vehicle could be what delivers her order,” Sherif Marakby, Ford’s vice president of autonomous vehicles and electrification, said in a Medium post before a CES keynote by Chief Executive Officer Jim Hackett. “We’ll study both what the merchant experience needs to be at the point of delivery and what the customer experience needs to be at that same point.”

Driverless Future

Ford’s announcement Tuesday is the latest at CES to confirm a driverless future is in the works but still a ways away. Even as General Motors Co. plans to have self-driving cars ready for a ride-hailing service in 2019 and Toyota Motor Corp. aims to demonstrate its new e-Palette concept at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, automakers are quick to admit that plenty of hurdles remain before drivers are totally removed from the equation on a major scale.

The tie-up comes on the heels of the automaker’s earlier partnership with Domino’s Pizza Inc. to test appetite for driverless pizza delivery. The results from the Domino’s test have started to shape how the automaker thinks about customer interaction in a driverless future.