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- DoorDash still has problems to solve before broadly using its autonomous delivery robot.
- Issues like loading the robots and tricky deliveries remain, CEO Tony Xu said.
- DoorDash is paying some delivery workers to manually load its robots, Business Insider reported.
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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