Ford Motor Company has quietly signed a US $100,000 contract with NASA’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL) to use the space agency’s quantum computer in its autonomous car research, according to a Space Act Agreement obtained by IEEE Spectrum.

The contract, which was signed in July by Ford’s Chief Technology Officer Ken Washington, will kick off a year-long effort to use QuAIL’s D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealer to address optimization problems of interest to the motor company.