Domino’s Nuro autonomous delivery vehicle
Source: Domino’s
The new Domino’s Pizza dealer is not a person, it is a self-contained car.
The restaurant company said Monday that a standalone car made by Nuro will begin delivering pizzas to Houston this week as part of a pilot program.
Customers will need to place a prepaid order on Domino’s website to ship it from the chain’s Woodland Heights location. If your order comes in on certain days and times, they can choose to have Nuro’s R2 robot leave the pizza. Once the robot arrives, customers will enter a unique PIN on the touch screen to request that the doors be opened so they can retrieve the pizza.
A Domino spokeswoman said the company does not yet have an end date for the pilot program.
The R2 robot is the first fully autonomous unoccupied road delivery vehicle to receive regulatory approval from the U.S. Department of Transportation. Nuro, which was founded by two former members of Google’s autonomous driving team, raised $ 500 million in its latest round of funding, which included an investment from Chipotle Mexican Grill.
Over the past decade, Domino’s has invested in technology to make ordering and receiving a pizza faster and easier, helping it attract customers from independent pizzerias and other chains, such as Papa John’s. Delivery of driverless pizza is one of the areas that has recently focused, although the company is still years, or even decades away, from replacing its entire fleet of drivers.
In 2019, the company announced its collaboration with Nuro. Two years earlier, he researched how consumers would react to the delivery of pizzas with a Ford autonomous car.
Domino shares have risen 13% in the last year, giving it a market value of $ 15.2 billion. The company has benefited from consumers ’desire to indulge during the coronavirus pandemic, but analysts are worried about pizza fatigue in the coming months.