Uber Eats wants to deliver your food with drones
The feeding frenzy continues.
Uber Eats, already one of the most popular food delivery apps, wants to elevate the game. As it works now, drivers pick up your food from a restaurant, put it in their car, drive with the goods, and then ring your doorbell with a bag full of dinner.
But at the Uber Elevate Asia Pacific Expo in Japan this week, Uber unveiled a new delivery method: the drone. Uber's drone team, known as Uber Elevate, will use what it's learned from its flying car service, known as UberAir, to try to provide faster, cheaper, and more reliable food deliveries.
Uber is already talking with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration about UberAir, so Uber's drone project would conceivably fit into those conversations. And Uber Elevate has tested some drone flights in San Diego, which has a pilot program for urban drone delivery in place.
Uber Eats has had a good year -- its app has been downloaded more times than competitors on Android devices in the past year, according to a survey from SimilarWeb.
And Uber says it has grown its Eats platform to $6 billion in bookings across 293 cities globally, with most growth occurring in its Asia/Pacific market. In India and Japan, Uber Eats has made it to neighborhoods before ride-hailing services.
No word yet on when your Uber food deliveries will come at you through the clutches of a drone, but if Amazon Prime Air's beleaguered dream of delivering your packages via drone is any indication, Uber Elevate could face a lot of scrutiny, pushback, and delays.
In the meantime, there's always IBM's recently revealed coffee-delivery drone patent to keep your drone dreams alive.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
