DoorDash's Dot robot faces hurdles from restaurant prep times to gated-community drop-offs before it can expand beyond Phoenix, CEO Tony Xu said.
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DoorDash's sidewalk delivery robot is not ready to leave Phoenix yet.
The company has spent months testing the Dot robot in parts of the Arizona city. CEO Tony Xu told analysts on Wednesday's second-quarter earnings call that DoorDash is still working on permits to bring Dot to other cities. A long list of operational problems needs solving first.
"I'm a big believer that you really have to nail something before you scale it," Xu said.
DoorDash has to figure out how long restaurants take to prepare orders before the robot arrives. The company also needs a plan for how Dot drops off at gated communities or hands orders to a doorman at an apartment building, Xu said.
Loading the robots is another bottleneck. DoorDash pays some workers about $5 per trip to load orders into Dots, Business Insider reported 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.
DoorDash laid out the full scope in its earnings release. The company needs to solve maintenance, manufacturing, and charging infrastructure "at scale" before Dot can expand. Xu did not give a timeline for when those issues might be resolved.
The same set of problems applies to DoorDash Air, the drone delivery service the company announced last month. DoorDash expects to start drone deliveries later this year. Xu drew a direct line between the two programs on the call.
Uber and DoorDash have both turned to autonomous vehicles to increase delivery volume without adding driver costs. Removing the human from the equation creates new problems around pickup coordination, drop-off logistics, and hardware reliability that do not exist with a human courier. Xu's comments suggest the company sees those as solvable, just not yet solved.
DoorDash did not say when Dot might expand beyond Phoenix or when the charging and loading issues would be fixed.
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