DoorDash bets on autonomy — and faces backlash

DoorDash stock rose after Barclays said robots and drones could sharply cut delivery costs, even as a White House promotion pulled the company into a political backlash. (finance.yahoo.com) Reuters, citing Barclays, reported April 15 that autonomous delivery now costs about $5 to $7 per order in early markets and could fall to about $1 over time. Barclays said DoorDash and Meituan look like near-term beneficiaries because they already have commercial deployments and face high labor costs. (finance.yahoo.com) DoorDash has spent the past year turning that pitch into products. On September 30, 2025, it unveiled Dot, an in-house robot built by DoorDash Labs that can travel on bike lanes, roads and sidewalks at speeds up to 20 miles per hour. (ir.doordash.com) The company said Dot is one-tenth the size of a car and began early access in Tempe and Mesa, Arizona. DoorDash also launched an Autonomous Delivery Platform that acts like a software dispatcher, assigning each order to a human courier, robot or drone based on cost, speed and location. (ir.doordash.com) DoorDash has also widened its drone network. In metro Atlanta this month, customers near Tanger Outlets in Locust Grove began seeing Wing drone delivery in the app, with eligible orders arriving in as few as 20 minutes. (wabe.org) That Atlanta rollout followed a March 31 partnership with Also, a small electric vehicle company, that included a strategic investment from DoorDash and a multi-year agreement to develop autonomous delivery vehicles. (prnewswire.com) DoorDash says the point is not to replace every driver with one machine. Stanley Tang, the company’s co-founder and head of DoorDash Labs, said after more than 10 billion deliveries, the company built Dot because cars, sidewalk robots and drones each solve different parts of the last-mile problem. (restaurantdive.com) The market liked that story. Google Finance showed DoorDash closing at $179.94 on April 15, with the stock up in a session that also featured fresh coverage of the Barclays note. (google.com) At the same time, DoorDash was dealing with criticism over a White House event on April 13 in which President Donald Trump received a McDonald’s order delivered by DoorDash driver Sharon Simmons to promote his tax-on-tips policy. Reuters and The Associated Press reported Trump handed Simmons what appeared to be a $100 bill. (usnews.com) (apnews.com) The backlash spread online after some users called the delivery staged and said they were deleting the app or canceling memberships. USA Today reported that Julian Crowley, a DoorDash public affairs official, responded to critics on X and told some of them to “touch grass.” (usatoday.com) That leaves DoorDash trying to sell two stories at once in April 2026: to investors, a lower-cost delivery network built around robots, drones and software; to customers, a brand that can keep a political photo-op from overshadowing the app on their phones. (finance.yahoo.com) (usatoday.com)