Amazon's drone delivery program is the joke it always sounded like.
Amazon's drone delivery program is the joke it always sounded like.
COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Exactly a decade ago, Amazon revealed a program that aimed to revolutionize shopping and shipping. Drones launched from a central hub would waft through the skies delivering just about everything anyone could need. They would be fast, innovative, ubiquitous — all the Amazon ...
Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh more than 5 pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy.
You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn’t make off with your item or that it doesn’t roll into the street (which happened once to Lord and Silverman). But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees.
Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery.
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And it will keep on being a joke until, suddenly, one day it's not.
The joke are the people that believe drone delivery won't be a thing.
I'll bite.
Drones are loud as fuck and if drone delivery became common there would be a massive backlash from the public. Most people live in cities and do not have a yard to put a target on lol. Drone delivery in cities is almost certainly less cost efficient than truck delivery. Land drones are much more likely in cities, or just dudes with cargo bikes like in many European cities.
So yeah drone delivery might "become a thing" but I doubt it will be mainstream.
And that's not even getting into the point of how much easier and less illegal it is to snipe an Amazon drone out of the sky for its payload than it is to assault an Amazon delivery truck and driver. It may not be more common in the long run than porch pirates, because that's also easy and low risk, but I 100% fully guarantee you our redneck population will be out in some capacity hunting for Christmas presents.
"In the land of the drones, the man with the t-shirt cannon is king."
I'm not gonna lie, this had never occurred to me. But now that it has, it is 100% gonna be my hobby of the future
Bow hunting both gives the drone a sporting chance, and helps you soak in that Horizon Zero Dawn feel.
Instructions unclear, built air compressor powered blunderbuss
I'm setting up nets as we speak! Going to trawl the skies for goods
Places like Los Angeles are mostly SFH. Most areas are already loud as fuck from road noise, proximity to airports, etc. Nobody will notice a few drones.
If it becomes popular in LA, that's pretty much definition of mainstream.
It is remarkable to me how tolerant as a society we have gotten to noise. We just accept that someone has a right to drive modified motorcycles at 3am with 8 of their buddies.
It isn't legal (in US) and cops do occasionally set up decibel traps, especially in places frequently visited by motorcyclists, but I completely agree with you. Quiet nights outside of city feel strange now.
I'm setting up nets as we speak! Going to trawl the skies for goods, just as north sea fishing boats do
We have Wing in Australia and gotta say getting small tech delivered or medicine by drone is very convenient. It gets lowered instead of dropped.
The drone planes in Africa delivering medical supplies are amazing.
I won’t say never, but when and how will drone delivery be more efficient than a truck?
Per package it’s more energy, it’s more risk, and the tech is harder.
To purchase a fleet of drones big enough will cost more than paying a driver for a long time still.
Pretty much everybody in this thread who is laughing at Amazon’s drones is thinking of drones as they are right now. But Amazon is not using drones because it’s a good idea now. They’re using drones now so they already have the experience and the setup when inevitable technical progress happens.
The drones might never work out or they might eventually work out, but this is exactly how Amazon got so big in the first place. They started selling books online when a lot of people still weren’t sure whether that could work and they started selling cloud computing almost ten years before anyone else thought to do that.
Fair, but the flying drone delivery in my opinion doesn’t scale up.
I think the real savings would be in something like a robot moving packages from the truck or a mobile base to the door.
Per package it’s more energy
How you figure? compared to point to point electrical energy costs compared to moving a truck mass around streets with constant stopping/starting?
It’s the same as a train, by moving bulk you reduce average costs. Plus drones have to stay in the air, and travel from their base for each package, whereas if a truck has two stops on a street it’s moving less distance.
Train isn't doing point to point.
You're gonna have to actually do the calculations before making claims.