DoorDash is taking delivery to the sky. The company revealed more details about its own drone delivery service, which will launch in Northern California in the coming months with Chipotle, Popeyes, and Momo N Curry as restaurant partners. The service could take flight this year without the usual airborne racket — literally.
DoorDash is using custom aircraft built around the orders its platform already handles. The drone has six slow-spinning propellers and a design intended to fit the communities where it will operate, rather than forcing those communities to adapt to a generic aircraft.
That distinction is central to DoorDash’s pitch. Around 80 percent of restaurant orders available on DoorDash are small and light enough for drone delivery, giving the company a large pool of meals that could move through the air instead of traveling by road.
“We didn’t start with a drone and ask what would fit. We started with what people order and how local businesses actually operate, then built the entire system from there,” said Harrison Shih, head of DoorDash Air. The statement sounds less like a futuristic manifesto than a product brief — which is probably the point.
Initial tests showed delivery times from the restaurant to the consumer’s door in under five minutes on average. DoorDash did not frame the drone as a solution for every order; its stated focus is the large share of meals that are small and light enough to make the system practical.
Noise is another part of the design. DoorDash says the drone produces about as much cruising noise as a passing car, while its six slow-spinning propellers emit sound comparable to a passing car at cruising height.
“You won’t really hear it,” Shih said. That is an ambitious promise for an aircraft carrying dinner overhead, but quieter hardware matters if drone delivery is going to operate near the communities it serves rather than remain a technology demonstration with excellent public relations.
DoorDash cofounder and chief product officer Stanley Tang is also tied to the company’s drone delivery effort. The program’s early lineup gives the service recognizable restaurant partners, while the custom aircraft and order-focused design give DoorDash a specific argument for building its own system.
The Northern California launch will test whether those choices hold up outside initial trials. DoorDash expects the new drone to launch “in the coming months,” with Chipotle, Popeyes, and Momo N Curry among the businesses involved.
The larger claim is straightforward: drone delivery does not need to carry every kind of order to matter. If 80 percent of available restaurant orders fit the aircraft and average delivery time stays below five minutes, DoorDash has a clear case for sending selected meals above the traffic instead of through it.
For now, the company has disclosed the aircraft’s six-propeller layout, its quieter cruising profile, its light-order target, and its Northern California launch plan. The hard part is no longer making a drone fly. It is making one useful, quiet, and ordinary enough that a meal arriving from the sky does not become the most dramatic thing on the block.
Based on
- DoorDash drone deliveries are first coming to northern California with Chipotle and Popeyes on board — engadget.com
- DoorDash expands menu of delivery options with custom-built drone — axios.com
- DoorDash Says Its Delivery Drone Is Lighter and Quieter Than Amazon’s – Business Insider — businessinsider.com
- DoorDash is using custom aircraft for drone deliveries. | The Verge — theverge.com
