The biggest problem with Uber Eats, aside from being the person whose food is last in the drop-off queue (you can pay to avoid that), is having to wait for delivery. Traffic, outages, a restaurant that doesn’t actually exist (this really happened) — all of that can impact how quickly your tasty noms are delivered.
The transport app’s food delivery arm can’t (or won’t, in some cases) do much about the latter two, but a new partnership between Uber Eats and a company called Flytrex might address the whole traffic scenario. Following a previous flirtation with drone delivery, the company is trying again with new drones.
Uber Eats in the air
Or, at least, it will be. Parent company aims to “build the world’s most flexible, multimodal delivery network,” and adding autonomous drone food delivery is on the list of checkboxes. A series of pilot cities in the US is expected to join Uber Eats’ network before the end of the year, serviced by Flytrex’s autonomous drones. It’s not an outlandish idea, either.
That’s because Flytrex has already made a name for itself, leveraging its FAA license to operate beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) to hand over 200,000 aerial meals and counting in the past three years. That’s a decent track record to build on, with Uber’s president of autonomous mobility and delivery, Sarfraz Maredia, saying that its new Flytrex partnership brings “the speed and sustainability of drone delivery to the Uber Eats platform, at scale, for the first time.”
“Together, we’ll reshape how food, convenience items, and other essentials move through cities.”
Read More: Uber Eats is adding AI to its app, because that will stop your dinner from arriving cold*
The optimism from Uber Eats is to be expected. No company enters a new venture sounding uncertain unless their endgame is to put off their investors. But the transportation and logistics entity reckons that flying deliveries will cut down delivery times, reduce costs, and also benefit the environment.
Of course, those last two points will whallop existing human delivery drivers square in the squishy bits, since it’s hard to compete with a robotic critter that doesn’t sleep and doesn’t have to feed a family (with their salaries. Uber Eats drivers feed other families all the time). But Uber’s bottom line could improve in direct proportion to how crisp your Wimpy chips are when the drone lands on your lawn. That’s worth making the change, surely?
