Miami residents could soon have their groceries delivered from Walmart in a self-driving Ford vehicle.
On Wednesday, the Dearborn, Mich.-based automaker announced it's teaming up with the world's largest retailer and Postmates on a new autonomous vehicle (AV) grocery delivery pilot program in the South Florida city. The partnership comes after Ford earlier this year first started piloting its self-driving vehicle delivery service in Miami with Domino's and Postmates. Since then, the company has also started transporting tacos, floral arrangements, and dry cleaning in self-driving vehicles.
Now, Ford will spend the next few months learning about Walmart's operations to understand what types of items can be delivered via AVs and how to best do it. The idea is to deliver everything from food—even perishable goods—to diapers, personal care items, and pet food. In a blog post announcing the initiative, Ford Autonomous Vehicle Business Lead Brian Wolf pointed out that supermarket orders will be larger than restaurant or dry cleaning orders, adding complexity to this pilot.
But since both Ford and Walmart already work with Postmates, they'll be able to use the courier service's existing infrastructure to get this new service "up and running quickly," Wolf wrote. Walmart already offers grocery deliveries via Postmates, Uber, and Deliv in select markets, and expects to expand this option to 800 stores across 100 metro areas across the country by the end of the year, and double that next year.
"Like us, Walmart believes that self-driving vehicles have an important role to play in the future of delivery," Wolf wrote. "We're confident that working with Walmart will strengthen our effort to successfully deploy self-driving vehicles in a way that people actually want to experience—whether they're ordering takeout, groceries, or anything else they might need."
Meanwhile, this isn't Walmart's first test pilot involving autonomous vehicles. As part of a separate trial launched in July, Google parent company Alphabet's self-driving car division has been transporting riders to and from Walmart stores in the Metro Phoenix area to pick up their grocery orders.