Food delivery has garnered a lot of attention recently with more and more brands offering to bring your favorite food to your home. Thanks to innovative food ordering platforms such as JustEat, Grubhub, Foodler, and Food Panda, it's never been easier to have amazing restaurant-quality food in the comfort of your own home.
Not content with disrupting the taxi industry, Uber launched UberEats in 2014. The freelance takeout service has enabled restaurants who wouldn't have traditionally offered home delivery to start offering it to their customers. Customers place an order through the UberEats app, and an UberEats courier collects the food from the restaurant and brings it to the customer's address for a flat fee.
UberEats
Uber has unveiled more details about its plans for Eats delivery via drones. If all goes according to Uber’s plan, it will start flying its first drone model before the end of the year.
Uber’s design, which it unveiled at the Forbes 30 under 30 Summit today, is made to carry up to one meal for two people. Featuring rotating wings with six rotors, the vehicle can vertically take-off and land, and travel a maximum of eight minutes, including loading and unloading. The total flight range is 18 miles, with a round-trip delivery range of 12 miles.
As Uber previously said, the plan is not to use the drones for full delivery, but rather a portion of it. Once a customer orders food, the restaurant will prepare the meal and then load it onto a drone. That drone will then take off, fly and land at a pre-determined drop-off location.
Behind the scenes, Uber’s Elevate Cloud Systems will track and guide the drone, as well as notify an Eats delivery driver when and where to pick up their food. Down the road, Uber envisions landing the drones on top of parked Uber vehicles located near the delivery locations. From there, the Eats delivery driver will complete the last mile to hand-deliver the food to the customer.
Beginning next summer, Uber wants to use this drone for meal deliveries in San Diego. That would come after Uber first tests deliveries in partnership with drone operators and manufacturers.
The service would likely work in much the same way as Amazon Air - the drone delivery system nearing readiness from the eponymous ecommerce giant. However, while the Amazon drone service launches from the company's own warehouse locations and flies directly to the customer's address, the Uber Eats equivalent would need to work slightly differently.
Drone Delivery
Uber is keeping its cards close to its chest when it comes to the exact nature of its drone-related plans but has made no secret of the fact that it's interested in adding the technology to its UberEats offerings. The job listing spotted by the Wall Street Journal suggests the service will be named UberExpress.
"Although the company may not want to discuss its food-delivery drone timeline, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is open about Uber's interests in drones," reports Forbes. "He also pointed out that the company was involved in a commercial drone-testing program. Back in July 2016, UberEats partnered with Dialexa to host an event in Dallas, which featured flying drone delivery. Modified drones, capable of carrying 10 pounds, delivered food to eager guests on the ground. Due to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations, the drones could not go higher than 400 feet and required a human pilot on the ground."
And that's the real rub with drone delivery - and the reason Amazon hasn't yet managed to roll out its own Air service. The number and complexity of the regulations involved provide a vast tangle of red tape which must be sorted through before the drones can take to the skies en masse. And if an ecommerce giant such as Amazon has yet to adequately cut through the bureaucracy, other brands have their work cut out for them.
The goal of drone delivery is speed. According to Bloomberg, for a delivery 1.5 miles away transporting goods by ground transportation averages 21 minutes while drones can make the trip in about 7 minutes.
Uber's plans for drone deliveries come a day after the company announced it would be partnering with AT&T on 5G air taxis. The companies hope to launch commercial services in 2023 across Los Angeles, Dallas Fort Worth and a yet-to-be-announced international city.
Uber’s drone reveal comes after Google got FAA approval earlier this month to begin commercial drone delivery in Virginia. At the same time, Google’s Wing has partnered for deliveries for FedEx and Walgreens, and unlike Uber’s drones, Wing appears to be dropping off directly at a consumers house via a tether that lowers.
Regardless, there are still a ton of details that need to be worked out before drone delivery is an everyday thing. As I wrote about last week, when it comes to delivery, we are watching the world change in real time, and having to figure it out as we go.