DoorDash's delivery robot isn't quite ready for prime time.
The delivery service has spent the last several months testing its Dot delivery robot as it makes deliveries in parts of Phoenix, Arizona. And while the company is working on securing permits for Dot to expand to other cities, there's still a lot that the company needs to figure out before it expands the autonomous delivery option, CEO Tony Xu said on a second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.
"I'm a big believer that you really have to nail something before you scale it," Xu said.
To make autonomous deliveries work, DoorDash has to correctly estimate how long it will take restaurants to prepare orders, Xu said. The company also has to figure out how Dot can drop off orders at gated communities or interact with a doorman at an apartment building.
Xu also pointed to the issue of loading the robots. The company is paying some DoorDash workers about $5 to load orders into Dot robots, Business Insider reported on Sunday.
Those challenges "might be literally one one thousandth the number of issues that you have to solve to actually have a chance at making autonomous deliveries actually happen," Xu said on Wednesday's call.
DoorDash will also have to solve similar problems for DoorDash Air, the drone delivery service that it announced last month. The company expects to start drone deliveries later this year.
Companies like Uber and DoorDash have turned to autonomous vehicles to make more ride-hailing trips and deliver more orders over the past year. Without people driving them, though, the companies must solve a number of problems.
With Dot, DoorDash is trying to solve issues from maintenance and manufacturing to having infrastructure to charge the robots, the company wrote in a press release on its second-quarter earnings.
Those "are all extremely difficult and must be addressed at scale," DoorDash said in the release.
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Alex Bitter is a senior retail reporter covering the gig economy, food, and retail. His work focuses major gig delivery and ride-hailing apps, including Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Walmart's Spark. He is interested in everything from what it's like to work on the apps to the companies' business strategies.Some of his recent stories feature gig workers who have been deactivated on the apps, DoorDash hiring traditional employees to make deliveries, gig workers' use of bots, and gig work expanding into new professions, such as nursing.Alex has also written about Aldi's US expansion, Starbucks' turnaround efforts, and the fallout from Kraft-Heinz's budget cutting. Convenience store chain Sheetz ended its "smile policy" after his reporting.Before joining Insider in September 2020, he wrote about consumer and retail companies for S&P Global Market Intelligence. He's a graduate of the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and grew up on the Big Island.Alex lives in the Washington, DC, area, where you can find him studying ancient coins or searching for Civil War artifacts with his metal detector in his free time.Got a tip? Reach out at [email protected] or via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (808) 854-4501.
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