Ford is Setting up Shop in Miami with Self-Driving Cars.

Ford is setting up for an autonomous ride-hail and delivery business in Miami

Ford is laying the groundwork for its autonomous vehicle business in Miami, Fla. It's a three-pronged approach that is still in its infancy, but includes a delivery pilot in partnership with Dominos and Postmates, testing self-driving cars around the city and setting up a fleet-management center.

 From article, (Ford is laying the groundwork for its autonomous vehicle business in Miami, Fla. It’s a three-pronged approach that is still in its infancy, but includes a delivery pilot in partnership with Dominos and Postmates, testing self-driving cars around the city and setting up a fleet-management center.

Without drivers, the company has to determine who or what will take on both the responsibility and the costs of maintaining these vehicles. There’s no longer an Uber driver in the front seat to take the car to get detailed on their own dime.

Sherif Marakby, Ford’s VP of autonomous vehicles and electrification, said the company has yet to decide whether it will operate this network of fleet-management centers on its own or partner with another company.

“We can do it in many different ways,” Marakby told Recode. “We’re going to be open to that, but for us to learn how it works and what the issues are, we needed to do it on our own for the first time.”

Like most other companies in the self-driving space, Ford will begin testing its self-driving cars on public roads. In Miami, however, the cars — powered by self-driving startup Argo.AI, in which Ford bought a majority stake — are still mostly mapping out the city’s streets for now. The company said they are also operating in a closed loop in autonomous mode.

Those cars will eventually be available in a commercial ride-hail network. The company recently partnered with Lyft and is currently working on creating the interface for the system and the API into the company’s network, Marakby said. There’s no word just yet on when consumers will be able to hail a Ford vehicle on the Lyft app.

At the same time, Ford is beginning a test of its delivery partnerships with Dominos and Postmates, but it won’t be autonomous at first. Instead, the company is simply trying to learn more about the customer interactions with a delivery vehicle. The company is attempting to understand things like how far customers are willing to walk to a car to get their delivery.

In the pilot phase, there will be two separate fleets dedicated to either delivery or ride-hail, but Marakby said that could change once the company launches the businesses, depending on the volume of deliveries or goods that need to be delivered.)

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