The CEO of Dordash, Tony Xu, says the way to autonomous deliveries full of ‘much pain and suffering’, but the company is about to be in the first entry of commercial progress

“Candidally, has been full of much pain and suffering,” Xu said in an interview on the stage on Monday in FortuneThe Brainstorm Technology Conference in Park City, Utah.

Dordash has been working on autonomy and robotics technology since around 2017, Xu said in what he described as a “long trip.” Any company that tries to get involved in autonomous technology and to make it on a scale must master a variety of different skills, he said: “Imagine learning a new sport, but that sport has five different subdomains just to say that you are a rookie in that sport.”

You must build the hardware, develop the software and adjust the delivery network also, particularly in the event that an autonomous delivery vehicle ends up stuck and that needs human intervention. “It is very rare for a company to be equally good in all those skills,” Xu said. “I think we have the potential to be one of those companies, but I think we are still very early in the construction of competition.”

Dordash has been adopting a multiple approach, associated with other companies in things such as robot and drone deliveries, but also developing some of its own internal autonomous technologies. For example, Dordash is working with Coconut Robotics to try robots that transport food and groceries through sidewalks on Los Angeles and Chicago, and has been making drones deliveries with a subsidiary of Alfabé drones, in Australia. Internally, the company has its own arm called “Dordash Labs”, where the company is working on patented delivery robots.

Xu said those long -term investments that the company began to make eight years ago began to bear fruit. These investments are “beginning to reach the first entry of commercial progress.”

When asked where customers could experience some of these forms of autonomy in the United States, Xu specified that there are still no formal autonomous commercial operations.

“We still don’t have it operating today. Much of that is in trial forms,” ​​Xu said. But he pointed out that drone deliveries are occurring in Australia and that Dordash has begun to obtain the necessary permits to start making drone deliveries in “selected cities” in the United States

Until now, there is no specific timeline, or, at least, not even an XU is ready to speak publicly.

“Let’s see how fast the team can deliver,” he said.