Ford Motor Company, Walmart Inc. and delivery service Postmates Inc are trying to do something innovative for delivery industry. The trio is collaborating to design a service for delivering groceries and other goods to Walmart customers that one day may turn out as self-directed vehicles.
Ford has been doing a lot lately to develop businesses that could make use of self-directed vehicles. This project seems to be the latest project that the company is touting in this way. Already, in recent times Ford has been working in collaboration with Postmates to develop delivery services that will make use of automated vehicles.
The latest effort on the part of the three companies will initially have human driven vehicles operated to simulate how a self-directed vehicle would act when on the road. Ford expects that there should be a launch of commercial production of automated vehicles by the year 2021.
As a testing ground, Miami is being used by Ford and its partners for automated delivery service ideas and automated technology. This new pilot project is meant to offer customers delivery by Postmates of their goods ordered from Walmart stores. Of course, this produce will take a couple of months before it can really be decided what sort of goods can be delivered in this way. One type of good that is really delicate are perishable groceries.
For perishable goods, the company may think along new ideas which in turn may require new designs or new equipment for vehicles. Ford is reportedly working on designing on-board storage systems that are easy for customers to open to retrieve a pizza or another kind of package.
Postmates, however, is already known to operate all over United States in 385 cities, as well as in Mexico. It services include delivery from restaurants and stores.
Walmart on its part, is competing with online retailer Amazon and other rival companies in a bid to cut costs of operation especially to people who order goods online. The best way to do that seems to put vehicles that don’t have active drivers in them to cut costs. However, the other side to it is that the technology to build these autonomous vehicles and operate them is very expensive. Second will be what type of regulations will be put in place to protect autonomous vehicles owners or manufacturers from liability claims.
