DoorDash is getting ready to send your burritos over traffic instead of through it. The company just received a key FAA certification that clears the way for it to run its own commercial drone delivery service, with in-house–designed drones and the software and ground infrastructure to match, the Wall Street Journal reports. DoorDash has tested aerial delivery for years via partners like Alphabet's Wing, but this marks its first move into building and operating a full, proprietary system—from routing to restaurant handoff zones. DoorDash says it will build the drones in the US, using mostly American-made components.
The rollout will remain limited for now, given regulatory hurdles and community concerns over noise, safety, and privacy. The company says it plans to reveal later this year when the drones will start flying to customers. TechCrunch predicts that DoorDash will probably start with "limited pilot programs in which the unmanned aircraft will travel short distances while remaining within the line of sight of the operator."
- Robin Riedel, executive vice president for aviation and mobility at AI infrastructure company Metropolis Technologies, tells the Journal that drones could make deliveries faster and cheaper. "Today you're driving a 3,000-pound car with a driver clogging up streets to basically deliver a 1-pound burrito or something," Riedel says.
DoorDash is now "officially certified as an air carrier," co-founder and chief product officer Stanley Tang wrote in a blog post, quipping that the move definitely wasn't in the business plan when they started delivering restaurant food from fellow co-founder Tony Xu's Honda Accord in 2013. Tang, calling drones the "next frontier of delivery," said the effort will pose some interesting challenges. "We didn't start with the question, 'What's the coolest autonomous tech we could make?'" he wrote. "We started from first principles: What's the actual customer problem that needs to be solved?" He said the company is hiring engineers.
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