Is Jeff Bezos Looking to Buildout an Underground Delivery Network?
Today, Wendy’s announced that they will be testing an underground delivery system later this year in partnership with Pipedream Labs. According to the announcement, the system will deliver orders to customers through a pick-up portal using “autonomous robots” that traverse the underground pipeline system.
Spoon readers may remember Pipedream Labs as a company with big plans to build an underground delivery network of pipes around cities to deliver food or other supplies right into homes. The company is working with Wendy’s and other restaurants in the near term — you’ve got to pay the bills, after all — but it still hopes to build a bigger vision for a city-wide underground delivery network.
In fact, in recent Twitter threadPipedream CTO Canon Reeves said the company is now dating well-organized community builders with a home delivery system.
According to Reeves, the Home Portal system would look like this:
And delivery robots look like this:
Building these systems into new well-planned communities makes a lot of sense for a number of reasons, the first being that reassembling existing homes to bring them underground would be very difficult and expensive. Well-planned communities present green space with opportunities to build concepts like this, where customers can be offered an option as a feature in the new home, and the cost of the home system can be included in the loan. Homebuilders can also build delivery infrastructure as they put other infrastructure, either underground or near public right-of-way (as they do. in Atlanta in a public way).
But even if the company is only focused on new construction opportunities, the idea is the same still a little far, the kind of far where you almost need a curious billionaire who invests in crazy ideas to get behind something like this.
Someone like, I don’t know, Jeff Bezos:
According to ReevesBezos stopped by last month to test a prototype for home delivery. And although Reeves didn’t say anything beyond that – like Bezos he’s interested in investing in the system – one can guess that the guy who founded the biggest online ordering market in the US might want to know what a future with an underground network might look like.
Could he be there on behalf of Amazon? It is possible. It’s not like Amazon isn’t investing in delivery infrastructure, and, in fact, the company has invested an estimated $40 billion from 2014-2020 and continues to do so. And, let’s not forget, Amazon itself has tested the concept of underground delivery before and was granted a patent for the idea in 2017.
And although this is not an Amazon thing, but a millionaire-investor-Jeff-Bezos-thing, Bezos has shown a willingness to invest in big ideas like space flight, and if Elon can build underground tunnels to shoot people in Teslas, Bezos will be in his absolute right to think that sending things underground through pipes may have a future.
