With its acquisition of Scotty Labs, a startup that aims to develop remote-controlled and also autonomous vehicle tech, DoorDash is taking the next step in the direction of automating food delivery.
Scotty Lab’s CEO Tobenna Arodiogbu announced this deal on a Medium post, saying that the company’s “core belief” is that “autonomy and remote assistance will be the future of logistics.”
The End Of Human Delivery Drivers?
This means that DoorDash is trying to reduce or eliminate how much it relies on humans for delivering. There have been some issues associated with its human delivery drivers as of late, when it was brought to light that the company was paying workers’ wages with customer tips instead of adding them on to the base salary.
After quite a bit of backlash, DoorDash announced that it would be ending this generally frowned-upon practice, but this has yet to happen. Much like Uber, it would appear that DoorDash is just waiting out until human drivers can be eliminated altogether.
The technology that DoorDash has gained from Scotty Labs will certainly help with this goal, as Scotty Labs recently tested out a remote controlled car in San Francisco as well as a self-driving truck on a highway in California. DoorDash had previously acquired Square’s food delivery branch, Caviar, for about $410 million.
With the acquisition of these two companies, DoorDash is setting itself up both technologically and restaurant partnership-wise to head into the journey of self-driving cars that also happen to be pizza delivery systems. Let’s see what the future will bring.
DoorDash Food Delivery
