On Nov. 14, Ford announced that it is teaming up with Walmart to explore how self-driving vehicles can deliver everyday goods to people.

The companies are using the infrastructure of Postmates—whom they both had an existing partnership with before—to quickly establish and launch a pilot program that explores how Ford’s self-driving vehicles can complement Walmart’s existing delivery offerings.

“Like Ford, Walmart believes that self-driving vehicles have an important role to play in the future of delivery, and that true success comes from first learning how individuals want to use them in their daily lives,” Ford says in a company blog post.

“Together, we’ll be using research vehicles, designed to simulate an autonomous experience, to gather crucial data about consumer preferences and learn the best way we can conveniently connect people with the goods they need.”

Over the next few months, Ford will work with Walmart to get an understanding of its operations, identify what goods can realistically be transported using the service, and identify any issues that may need to be addressed to successfully deliver orders using self-driving vehicles.

With orders from a supermarket usually being larger and more varied than orders from, say a restaurant or dry cleaner, Ford and Walmart will look into different vehicle configurations or modifications that they can make to meet people’s needs, so that they accommodate perishable goods, or be prepared for instances when their vehicles end up making multiple deliveries on a single trip.

“Crafting an experience for people that’s easy to understand and simple to use is critical to our vision of making people’s lives a little bit easier. We’re committed to putting that effort in now instead of waiting for AVs to be on the road, having already completed more than 1,000 deliveries as part of the initial phases of building up our self-driving business,” Ford says.

“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.”

​A video demonstration of how the service will work can be seen here.