![]() ![]() ![]() Franchisees can purchase a custom-outfitted e-bike for up to $1,400. That's important for human delivery and also for maximizing utilization of an expensive asset like an autonomous vehicle."ĭomino's also just announced a partnership with Rad Power Bikes, a Seattle-based electric-bike startup, to provide Domino's franchise owners with e-bikes to replace vehicle deliveries. So this helps inform autonomous-vehicle users where we might need to set up stop points, or do we have to do that seem more continuous? With the restrictions on the ride-hailing business, it's already not easy to stop and double park."Īlso, Domino's is finding that newly available GPS tracking can help fine-tune the self-driven-delivery experience by "communicating to customers exactly when we'll be there. ![]() "Or are they even willing to walk around the block if they live in a single-family home? The further you make people walk, the less likely they are to adopt. ![]() "Not everyone wants to come down from their 30th-story apartment," Garcia said. So beyond the novelty, in these things you start to see some consumer value to it."Īreas to work on include figuring out how practical driverless vehicles that only go to the curbside would be in high-rise apartment buildings. Also, for some types of transactions, people just don't feel like dealing with a human - they'd rather just run out to the car, put in their PIN and get their pizza. "For one thing," Garcia said, "there's the value proposition of not having to tip. The company's testing and research already has persuaded Domino's executives that driverless delivery offers a certain allure for many customers. "We're going to start with one store," Garcia said, "but our plan is, as we're successful, to continue to scale as fast as regulation and production will allow." Much narrower than a car, it can pull over to the side of a street and let faster, conventional traffic pass it by. R2 will be allowed to navigate within apartment complexes, for example. The other attractive piece is that, because is limited to 25 miles per hour, it has more flexibility in what it can do and where it can deliver, right now, compared with some of the regulatory of dealing with driverless passenger vehicles at this point." "We just didn't need the complexity of what you see in a passenger vehicle to execute the delivery of five pounds of food. "Longer term, the overall cost of delivery in a vehicle like this is going to be less than with a passenger vehicle," Kelly Garcia, chief technology officer of Domino's, told me. Customers enter a code to obtain their order from the Nuro. Kroger has been experimenting with Nuro to move groceries in Houston and in Scottsdale, Arizona. The R2 is about half the size of a typical sedan and designed specifically for its appointed task, without space for a human and with a top speed of 25 mph. Nuro, the self-driving-delivery startup founded by a pair of Google veterans in 2016, will begin testing its R2 model with Domino's to autonomously deliver pizza and other fare out of one Domino's store in the Houston area. But just very recently, the popularity of third-party food-delivery services such as Uber Eats has helped Pizza Hut and other fast feeders to check Domino's - while Domino's sticks with its strategy of performing all of its own deliveries and disdaining third parties. The company used online ordering and other digital technologies to finally surpass Pizza Hut in sales in 2018. While the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based company was an early experimenter with self-driving vehicles because of the importance of delivery to its business model, the tests may be taking on more urgency these days because it turns out that delivery has become something of a chink in the armor for Domino's. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |