- A new feature on the DoorDash app tracks how often its workers break or accelerate suddenly.
- The information will be available to dashers through "Driving Insights," the company said Friday.
- It's one of several changes that DoorDash has made to its app in recent months.
DoorDash is now keeping track of how often some of its drivers break or accelerate suddenly, it said Friday.
The company is piloting a feature called "Driving Insights," which gives its gig workers information on how often the app identifies "rapid changes in braking and acceleration," according to a statement. DoorDash said the feature uses the same location data from workers' phones that it already uses for features like navigation.
"Based on this data, Dashers will learn about their individual driving behaviors and can easily review things like braking and acceleration history for their most recent dash, or whether hard braking and rapid acceleration have changed over time," the company said.
DoorDash has been testing Driving Insights since July in Phoenix and Salt Lake City. With Friday's announcement, the feature will be available for DoorDash drivers in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Detroit, Cleveland, Miami, Charlotte, and Palm Beach, the company said.
It's not the first time that a gig work app has kept tabs on the driving habits of its independent contractors.
Amazon has used an app called Mentor for years to see some of its delivery drivers' habits behind the wheel. The app assigns each driver a score and penalizes them for hard stops, quick acceleration, speeding, and other driving issues.
DoorDash will also now show workers their real-time speed next to the posted speed limit when they use in-app navigation, the company said Friday. The company has already rolled out that feature to all Dashers.
The company is also expanding an integration of its app with Apple CarPlay, which allows workers to display a navigation map on their car's dashboard display as they pick up and deliver orders. That feature will now be available in 17 markets, DoorDash said.
The features are meant to improve safety for DoorDash workers, Austin Haugen, Vice President of Dasher Product, said in the company's statement announcing the feature changes.
"Testing these new features is another important step toward achieving this goal," Haugen said.
The delivery service has made other changes to its app this year. In June, DoorDash started sending tipping "nudges" through its app to customers who haven't left a gratuity for their delivery worker.
This fall, the company started issuing a more direct message to customers: "Orders with no tip might take longer to get delivered – are you sure you want to continue?"
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