GM's self-driving unit Cruise partners with DoorDash to test a food delivery service in San Francisco starting in early 2019
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
Cruise has been running autonomous ride hailing for its own employees in San Francisco since 2017, but no paying passengers — and GM bought the startup in 2016 explicitly to reach driverless cars commercially. DoorDash is not new to autonomy either: it tested sidewalk deliveries with Starship Technologies' robots back in 2017.
The delivery pilot matters because it gives Cruise a second use case for its fleet while passenger service remains unmonetized — a hedge that proved prescient when Cruise later admitted it would miss its 2019 target for a commercial robotaxi launch, citing performance and safety concerns.
First-order effects
- DoorDash gains a car-scale autonomous delivery option in San Francisco beyond Starship's sidewalk robots, and Cruise gets real-world goods-transport data from a commercial partner rather than internal testing.
Second-order effects
- Rival delivery platforms with AV exposure — Postmates among them via the same Starship partnership — face pressure to lock in their own vehicle-scale autonomy deals before DoorDash's car deliveries set customer expectations.
Third-order effects
- The pattern this starts — AV operators adding delivery as a revenue-adjacent use case while passenger service slips — runs through Cruise's later milestones, from its 2022 permit to charge fares on limited SF streets to the 2024 multiyear Uber partnership; goods delivery functions as both bridge business and fleet-utilization insurance.
The trend: Autonomous vehicle developers are pairing with delivery platforms as an interim monetization and data path whenever passenger robotaxi timelines stretch.