DoorDash delivery bots land in LA

The third-party delivery company will make some deliveries via those cute Coco sidewalk robots roving Los Angeles streets. (They're in Chicago, too!)

image courtesy of DoorDash

DoorDash has a new delivery partner: Coco the robot. Starting this month, some customers in Los Angeles and Chicago have the option to select robot delivery from hundreds of participating merchants in the DoorDash app.

The bots, which resemble small coolers on wheels, deliver goods from specific stores inside a tight radius. DoorDash piloted the tech for months ahead of this rollout, completing more than 100,000 deliveries.

DoorDash isn’t the only delivery company taking advantage of this new, mostly autonomous tech. Others, including rival service Uber Eats, have partnered with multiple robotics companies, including for deliveries in certain locations. It’s not DoorDash’s first bot deal either; the company introduced airborne drone delivery with Alphabet-owned Wing in a handful of U.S. markets.

This “multimodal approach,” according to a DoorDash spokesperson, should help the company make efficient and effective deliveries using the best method for any given order. Still, bot deliveries are a comparatively small part of DoorDash’s overall business; last year, it processed 2 billion-plus orders.

According to data from the National Restaurant Association, about a third of adults say they’d order food delivered by robots, including about half of millennials and Gen Z adults surveyed. Delivery companies have signaled plans to move ahead with even more delivery deals—DoorDash says these partnerships will help the company meet increasing consumer demand while lowering costs.

Should we expect our future meals to be delivered autonomously? Probably. But any sort of large-scale rollout is still likely years, or potentially decades away. And like any emerging technology, there’s some good—and some bad—involved. Even if delivery bots are paving the next frontier for the food industry, they’ve also hit some speed bumps along the way.

Here’s the good — and also a bit of the… less good.

Pro: Zero emissions

A fleet of electrified robots is objectively more eco-friendly than a fleet of cars. They take up less space on the road, and don’t use gas. “Not every delivery needs a 2-ton car just to deliver two chicken sandwiches,” Harrison Shih, senior director of DoorDash Labs, the company’s automation and robotics arm, said in a statement. (A particularly bold statement from a company that makes its money delivering chicken sandwiches in cars, I’d say.)

Con: Potentially questionable judgment

Two years ago, a Serve Robotics sidewalk delivery robot rolled through a crime scene in Los Angeles. (A nearby TV cameraman lifted the crime scene tape so the robot could get through.) Luckily, this story has a happy ending: No crime actually took place (it was found to be a hoax), and as a company exec told me at the time, the robot eventually delivered its payload.

Incidents like this are rare, and companies have safeguards in place to prevent them. “Every safe autonomous machine has some sort of fallback mode where it needs a human to take over,” says Jonah Bliss, founder of Curbivore, a conference focused on the future of delivery and mobility. “This is true whether you’re thinking about robotaxis or other brands of sidewalk bots.”

Pro: Precise technology

Robots can be scary accurate. Airborne drone delivery company Zipline can drop a pizza onto a backyard picnic table. That’s a remarkable—and highly convenient—feat. Sidewalk robots can be easily positioned outside a restaurant, ready to accept orders, meaning food is delivered faster, and probably fresher, than it would be after waiting on a human driver.

Con: Regulatory hurdles and disgruntled neighbors

Not everyone delights in flying drones. Residents of College Station, Texas, successfully grounded Amazon’s Prime Delivery drones, filing more than 100 complaints in opposition to Amazon’s plan to expand its drone delivery program in the area. (The Federal Aviation Administration ultimately decided that most complaints were meritless or outside its purview, but Amazon decided to end its College Station lease later this year.)

Regulatory standards vary from state to state and city to city, which could complicate a broad rollout of any type of delivery robot. But the sidewalk bots and flying drones perform best under highly specific circumstances: dense urban neighborhoods, self-contained areas like college campuses, or, in the case of robots in the air, sprawling suburbs.

Pro: No tipping

Tip creep is real. Nearly 9 out of 10 Americans think tipping culture has gotten out of control, according to recent survey data from WalletHub. Diners who opt to have robots deliver their dinner don’t have to tip. In fact, delivery apps will generally refund any tips promised during the initial order.

Delivery services don’t have the best record on tipping. Uber and DoorDash have settled with delivery couriers over the distribution of tips on the platform. Most recently, DoorDash paid close to $17 million in New York to settle claims that it unfairly used tips to subsidize worker pay from 2017 to 2019.

Con: No humans

In a January interview, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said that human drivers will be replaced by robots in about a decade. He spoke in the context of Uber’s ride-hailing business, but the company has made plenty of delivery deals, too. Uber Eats launched its own partnership with Coco last year in Los Angeles; earlier this month it expanded to Miami. In Phoenix, Uber uses autonomous Waymo vehicles—the same ones it uses to drive passengers—to ferry some Eats orders to diners. But the robots can’t ring the doorbell; diners still need to go to the curb to collect their food.

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