Domino’s Is Ready For Driverless Future, But Future Isn’t Ready Yet

One of the most innovative “mobility” companies in the world has been its largest pizza maker. Domino’s pioneered important delivery concepts including its original half-hour guarantee, a customized small car especially dedicated to pizza delivery with features such as an onboard warming oven, and the company’s recent commitment to purchase dozens of Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles for its company-owned fleet.

But Domino’s has changed its strategy in another area of mobility where the copmany also blazed trails. After experimenting a few years ago with an autonomously controlled Ford Fusion delivery vehicle, the fast-food leader based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has backed away for now from further experimentation with driverless delivery vehicles. This move generally follows a retreat by many automakers from hot pursuit of being able to introduce a legitimately driverless vehicle in the next few years.

“The only thing holding us back is the AVs themselves, and their ability to be broader in scale,” Domino’s CEO Russell Weiner told me recently. “And when they are in that space, we’ll be ready. You’ll need not only the auto industry but also government regulation to be on board.”

Domino’s began its experiment with Ford in 2017 amid the heyday of hype, mostly from Silicon Valley, that fully autonomous vehicles would be traversing American roadways by about now. Domino’s wanted to learn “what we needed to know before this stuff gets to scale,” Weiner said. “How to deal with stuff you don’t think of. For instance, if you live in an apartment, how do you as a customer see that — as a [complete] delivery, or are they willing to go downstairs? And when you’re in the [Domino’s] store, how do you hand off to an AV? What we’ve done with a couple of different companies, including Ford, is custom-learned all that stuff. We’re ready when the day comes and we have what we need.”

One scenario that developed in the driverless experimentation, Weiner recalled, was how the AV dealt with double-parking. “If you’re a delivery driver, you’d pull over to a person’s home and double park and put the [blinkers] on and get out the pizza and go and deliver it,” he said. “But the AV was programed not to double park. So what would happen is that the vehicle would keep going around the block. We had one poor woman chasing after the delivery vehicle in her flip-flops. You need to figure out things like that.”

Weiner said that suburban and rural areas proved easier for the experimental AV to traverse because of the commonality of driveways.

Just as it did a decade ago as it leveraged online ordering and fulfillment into the fastest and most profitable growth in the pizza industry, and ultimately to its No. 1 revenue spot in the category, Domino’s has been attempting to harness innovation in delivery to keep an edge on competition that comes in the form of other major chains such as Pizza Hut and Papa John’s, regional stalwarts including Little Caesar’s and Hungry Howie’s, and thousands of small local chains and mom-and-pops.

It purchased the Bolts to test the idea of a fleet of electric vehicles, with their charging requirements and other maintenance issues; Domino’s ordered the Bolts long before GM’s recent decision to discontinue production of the models. Domino’s also recently integrated an app with Apple CarPlay, making it the first pizza chain with the technology that turns a car’s infotainment screen into a connected iOS device.

But as far as fully driverless vehicles are concerned, Weiner said, Domino’s will be ready to utilize the technology when the entire transportation landscape has settled around it.

“Things like the government and insurance and law are going to evolve in order to really make that [future] hapen, but we’re where we need to be as things continue to develop.”