  A well-known conjecture by Lov\'asz and Plummer from the 1970s asserted that
a bridgeless cubic graph has exponentially many perfect matchings. It was
solved in the affirmative by Esperet et al. (Adv. Math. 2011). On the other
hand, Chudnovsky and Seymour (Combinatorica 2012) proved the conjecture in the
special case of cubic planar graphs. In our work we consider random bridgeless
cubic planar graphs with the uniform distribution on graphs with $n$ vertices.
Under this model we show that the expected number of perfect matchings in
labeled bridgeless cubic planar graphs is asymptotically $c\gamma^n$, where
$c>0$ and $\gamma \sim 1.14196$ is an explicit algebraic number. We also
compute the expected number of perfect matchings in (non necessarily
bridgeless) cubic planar graphs and provide lower bounds for unlabeled graphs.
Our starting point is a correspondence between counting perfect matchings in
rooted cubic planar maps and the partition function of the Ising model in
rooted triangulations.
