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Domino's Market Tests A Self-Driving Pizza Delivery Car (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes CNN:
Someday soon your Domino's Pizza could be delivered to you -- without an actual delivery person. Ford and Domino's are testing out a specially-equipped Ford Fusion that comes not only with self-driving technology but also an oven. It sounds cool but there is a catch -- there's no one to walk the pizza to your front door and ring the bell. That's what Ford and Domino's say they're really testing. "How will customers react to coming outside to get their food?" Domino's president Russell Weiner said in a statement, "We need to make sure the interface is clear and simple."
During the testing phase, an engineer and a driver will be in the car -- but the windows will be heavily tinted so customers can't see them. And both have been instructed not to interact with people at all. Domino's wants to see how well customers deal with coming out and getting their own pie from what is, basically, a pizza ATM built into the car. To get their pizzas, customers will have to enter a number on the touchpad, then a back window will lower, revealing the pizza. Over the next five weeks, randomly selected customers around Ann Arbor, Michigan, will be offered the option of getting their pizza delivered by the hi-tech "driverless" car.
During the testing phase, an engineer and a driver will be in the car -- but the windows will be heavily tinted so customers can't see them. And both have been instructed not to interact with people at all. Domino's wants to see how well customers deal with coming out and getting their own pie from what is, basically, a pizza ATM built into the car. To get their pizzas, customers will have to enter a number on the touchpad, then a back window will lower, revealing the pizza. Over the next five weeks, randomly selected customers around Ann Arbor, Michigan, will be offered the option of getting their pizza delivered by the hi-tech "driverless" car.
Perfect testing ground.
Whenever something cool supposedly happens, it's always lame and retarded when you get the details. Make a fucking delivery robot and maybe this would be news.
"How will customers react to coming outside to get their food?" Judging by the scary apartment building I delivered to 25 years ago or so, they'll go along with it.
A 2500 pound vehicle to carry one 1-pound pizza. That's efficient. Make it a drone, obviously.
When i order food for delivery it is because I either have a hang over or it is raining/cold and I therefore don't want to go outside. For me, NOT having to go outside is the whole point of getting food delivered.
Right now, the pizza comes to my door. I don't need to put shoes on or a coat. This customer experience is worse. Why would I choose it when there are other pizza deliveries that will still deliver to the door.
It would have to be significantly cheaper...
I'm never, ever tipping a robot for service.
So that's $3-5 cheaper already.
If they send a robot, we will lose the opportunity to look at the driver name in the tracking app and get in stalker mode if it sounds even vaguely like a girl name.
lucm, indeed.
People are going to abuse the hell out of this. They'll put excrement, used condoms, dead rodents, vomit, or god knows what else for the next customer to deal with.
"The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."
So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involvedâ"but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: the Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes. " â" Neal Stephenson
Walmart has shown that many people will put up with a crap product if it seems to save them a few bucks.
I'd just as soon pay a few bucks more and let the kid keep his delivery job.
#DeleteChrome
I was assured that we'd be 3D printing pizza by now, in this post-Luddite revolution we live in.
It's marketing bullshit which Slashdot runs without thinking. Slashdot. you used to be a great source of news. These days you're full of shit. How long has it been since I've seen an interesting news article posted on Slashdot? I can't even remember.
They're gonna hafta come up with new plots!!!
franchises stores don't have funds for owned cars no they under pay drivers to use there own. Lot's of them don't have commercial car insurance. As some personal car insurance does not cover pizza / food.
Good way to get in local lock up and makes it sound like there are safety issues and they don't want any one to say something about them.
Multi drop runs?? will they have more then holding area?
Fake orders and robbery setups will this system fall victim to them.
They could just launch a drone from the roof of the car to deliver the pizza to your doorstep. It could recharge itself from the car in-between deliveries. The bigger puzzle is how they deal with people who want to steal or destroy the car or the drone...
Sounds racist to me.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Combine the two types of autonomous vehicle for the best of both worlds. An autonomous EV van could be loaded with pizzas and able to launch short-hop delivery drones. It could keep one or more drones out delivering to the door while the rest are being recharged on the EV as their mothership.
This overcomes several issues, notably the lack of delivery to the door in Domino's (test) solution. It also ensures that pizza stays hot without needing a heavily insulated box since the trip by air would be much shorter. What's more, it allows the flying drones to be replaced with short-range wheeled delivery bots as an alternative, perhaps chosen on a house by house basis, which may be cheaper and more reliable, or even necessary in the rain.
Recharging on the mothership overcomes both efficiency and range issues, and allows smaller/cheaper batteries to be used in end-delivery vehicles. This in turn could lead towards the short-hop drones/bots becoming cheap, mass-produced, disposable delivery elements.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.
If Niel Gaiman can adapt so can they.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Really, so out of all the problems that autonomous vehicle manufacturers face in terms of developing, testing, and deploying their technology, the pizza part is the hard part? Get real. This will die within 18 months (sooner if they're smart).
The amount of uninformed ignorance of how hard a problem this is (not the pizza part) is astounding. It's almost a joke that they think to attach the triviality of the pizza to the problem.
Guess they finally threw in the towel on making a good pizza.
A 2500 pound vehicle to carry one 1-pound pizza. That's efficient.
The only time physicists use pounds is as a currency unit which would make this an economics question and a vehicle costing 2,500 pounds sounds pretty efficient to me. However, I'm not sure I would want to eat a pizza which cost one pound. Sometimes you can be too efficient.
it sounds like an inexpensive way for a gang of angry Luddites to set up an ambush for a machine. Plus presumably they get pizza.
Nullius in verba
...convoys of armed thugs in stolen vehicles trailing along behind these things, secure in the knowledge that people will be coming out of their houses late at night to pick up a pizza at the curb.
"Landshark Home Raiders" is a catchy name. Or maybe, "Su Casa Es Mi Casa, Inc."
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
...with current delivery of pizza. One two ton vehicle and an obese driver to deliver a pizza.
There are nuve pizza ovens and breadmakers that make the job easier.
I suppose that making a full automated pizza machine is possible and easier than a self driving veichle.
Or going actually to an Italian restaurant to eat pizzas, oer even ask a these restaurans to delive could and is a better option.
Think twice about supporting dominos, owner donates to anti abortion causes
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/dominos.asp
I suppose that making a full automated pizza machine is possible and easier than a self driving veichle.
Obviously it is, because there's a variety of frozen pizza options at your local supermarket which prove it. But on the other hand, that equipment may be too expensive for a pizzeria to purchase and maintain. Self-driving cars are coming to everyone, sooner or later.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They're hungry. If they weren't, they wouldn't have ordered a pizza. Odds are that they'll walk out to the curb to get it.
On the other hand, they didn't go take the pizza themselves from some take-away (= actually very popular here around at several italian restaurants. much better quality than Domino, btw).
Instead they specifically order that the food be brought to their place.
The reasons that they choose not to go out to a take-away might still apply and be reasons not to get to the car.
e.g.: they live in an upper floor of a stairs-only/no-elevator appartment complex, or the elevator is broken, and they can't walk easily (one leg still in a plaster cast after some accident).
I can see several situations where "you need to walk out to the car" defies the whole idea of getting your food delivered to your door.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Personally I wouldn't eat one if they delivered it with seven virgins on a full moon night.
But for people who like it, cool.
the issue is cost much like there fleet delivery cars that have ovens very few will actually ever be ordered by franchise owners.
I've seen what passes for "cuisine" in your country, it's horrible. No one in in Britannia should be slagging others cuisine, with what you people eat.
The fatal flaw with this plan is that customers end up with Domino's pizza instead of one that is actually good.
If I order from you, and send it by self-driving vehicle with no human, I will not accept it.
Of course, this just demonstrates how STOOOPID you are. If Dominos, and similar businesses do this, then what jobs are folks going to have to make money to order?
Henry Ford, Sr., decided to pay the employees on the assembly line enough so that they could buy what they built in a couple of years. You like that idea... but assume other companies will pick up for what you REFUSE to do.
Screw you. I do not suffer fools gladly, and this , most definitely, defines you as fools.
Front and Front-Side window tint is illegal in michigan under MCL 257.709
So I have to come out to the car that's parked somewhere nearby to pick up my pizza? What's next? Do I have to come down to the shop where they make it and pick it up there?
There is something wrong with a society that is focused on ways to eliminate people from being part of it. I don't know how to solve that issue...
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Bring it around the back, we are in the hot tub.
What a pain in the ass, I if I wanted to go get it I wouldn't have asked you to bring it to me in the first place. It's like asking your 2 yr old to bring you something.
> an engineer and a driver will be in the car -- but the windows will be heavily tinted so customers can't see them
Side and rear windows are one thing, but I was under the impression that it's pretty much illegal in all states to have *any* sort of tint on the windshield.
(If the purpose of the window tint is to have them so dark as to hide the fact that there's actually people in the car, then the windshield has to be tinted as well...otherwise it's pretty much useless)
"... customers finding ways to bypass the payment step."
Free pizza for hackers?
"The big problem is probably going to be that the technology to navigate a target rich environment without hitting anything/anybody doesn't exist and is probably going to be way harder to develop than most folks think."
That seems correct to me. The technology of self-driving vehicles seems to me to be far from ready for common use.
Pity the Middle Aged Women who "forgot" they ordered Pizza, and just happen to be "in the shower" when the Pizza delivery guy arrives, and they "drop" their towel when paying.
Years ago in Reseda, I was a "Pizza Man, He Delivers", I know what I'm talking about.
Yeah... they all gonna miss dat.