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.
As someone who frequently orders one can of soup, this is excellent news.
Dropping a can of soup 12ft onto a driveway seems bad for the can and for the driveway.
Self-opening soup can
Just give it a tiny parachute
Operation Gumbo Drop
It’ll be in Amazon packaging.
Can of soup wrapped in a brown cardstock bag 👍🏼
I’m pretty sure a twelve foot drop onto concrete isn’t good for a can of soup. Maybe it’d work for a T-shirt?
Or a beer… As long as it’s Lite Beer!
As long as you don’t leave your car in the driveway.
People buy clothes off of Amazon?
man killed by falling soup can which he ordered on Amazon
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Reminds me of an insurance company that wanted to use drones to survey roof damage and in the long run they decided it was overall better to just use a camera on a long ass stick.
Meanwhile in Rwanda:
There have been 13,000 deliveries to date and it has been estimated Zipline drones distribute 65% of blood outside of the capital city, Kigali.
https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/news/zipline-ghana-medical-supplies-drones/?cf-view
Just because Amazon is doing a terrible job of it, doesn’t mean it’s a job that can’t be done.
Shit like that is also a far, far better use of airspace/resources
Zipline is doing some freaking amazing things!
Yeah. Personal deliveries to your home may never be a practical thing. But, Zipline shows that there is a niche for drone deliveries that’s pretty amazing.
It’s real macgyver stuff. Maybe it doesn’t fit into the cyber aesthetic, but its some pretty fucking amazing stuff. I hope more such applications get found in time.
Ok sure, there’s limitations. So what percentage of their current deliveries are actually possible with drones? If it’s above 0%, then there’s an opportunity.
Beyond that it’s a finance/ risk/ reward/ regulation issue.
Imagine a van which drives into a suburban housing estate and instead of parking individually at different houses for 5-10 mins each, spends less than 5 mins prepping a set of drones which take off from the roof of the van and return in minutes.
It saves time and fuel. It doesn’t work everywhere, but it doesn’t need to.
In fact it could be the same van. Do deliveries exactly as normal, and use a drone for the last half mile when convenient. It’s not either/or.
The big win, I hear, is the massively rural areas;farms and cabins.
The truck can apparently launch two drones at a time, and they save time and fuel – and don’t present a driving hazard for a panel van which now needs to turn around in a potentially winding driveway. Then the truck moves on to the next stopping point when all drones are back.
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So if Amazon thinks they could do it themselves, and cheaper, that seems like a good reason for them to focus on it.
I still think it’s a gimmick, but them paying to outsource something is a reason to bring it in-house.
I remember people were hyped when they announced on Thanksgiving 2012 that drone delivery service was right around the corner. Brilliant marketing from them because people were hyped.
Turns out the FAA is that corner
I remember people being hyped about netting them or shooting them out of the sky.
I would like to take this time to thank the slow government FAA for preventing Amazon from clogging up the airspace with crappy drones and preventing a stupid system from taking off.
Aside from all the functional downsides, I’d expect these to go the way of Tesla when hitting a larger scale. Lawsuits and traffic incidents.
Another more successful operation in Rwanda and Ghana is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_company) delivering 1.8kg over 300km and dropped by parachute.
That works for special use cases in rural environments. They use drones for mail delivery on some German islands, for instance. As a mainstream delivery option in urban environments this is just laughably impractical and that has been very obvious from day one.
It’s certainly more useful in locations with insufficient infrastructure.
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
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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.
Welcome to the future
Great, it drops the package from 2 meters.
That’s an improvement over the delivery drivers that yeet my package over my fence
12 feet is more like 3.5-4
Just like plopping a grenade in a foxhole …
I’m just sitting here thinking personal home delivery maybe isn’t the most sustainable thing in the world.
Perhaps we could invest the massive amounts of money that it takes to deliver goods to homes into better transit and post offices that don’t look like crap.
We’ve had mail delivery for what, 200 years? We used to have (and some places still do) have milk and vegetable deliveries. It’s not even that expensive.
I had diaper pickup and laundry service a few years ago, which was amazing. Well worth the $.
If I’m honest it really is not at all surprising.
Hyperloop 2.0.
Delivering something by air is the least efficient way to do so, unless it’s Avdiivka and you deliver a grenade. Yeah, making them now is cheap (and we overproduce these unrecycleable toys), but what the upsides of using them instead of, like, land drones, or human workers, or some rail-system? It’s cool and fancy the first time you order it, but what’s the reason behind it other than our entertainment? Why not to make a delivery guy shoot fireworks once they are here - as enjoyable, and as chinese as these drones.
Why we want to produce this junk in the first place? And aren’t we afraid this shit records close-ups of each property itflies over?
There are places delivery with drones makes a lot of sense and is the best way to do it. It depends what the most important metric is.
In an African country they are delivering medicin and bloodbaths with a drone plane to hospitals that need them for emergencys. That way they only need to have one central stock of these supply’s that can be quickly dispatched. Driving wouldn’t be an option that would take several hours over bad roads. Veritasium did a video about it.
For Amazon deliveries it makes no sense at all.
bloodbaths
bloodbags?
Unless they crash when delivering them
I agree with you.
I’ve mentioned ukrainian Avdiivka, a battlefield, that isn’t accesible by usual means (and where aerial drones can launch a surprise attack).
The same goes to places with destructed or underdeveloped infrastructure.
Drones can be used in the least accesible places. But they ate tested in places that are already covered by drivers.
I disagree with you with the efficiency comment. In an ideal scenario, deliver by air can be super efficient. No road obstacles, shortest path trajectories, hell, the sky is 3D!
It’s been tried before: messenger pigeons.
It can be efficient, but the major pro-land point is: what would it do having 0 fuel?
A car would stop, a drone would drop.
It’s an exception and no one would pilot a drone to it’s exhaustion, but either way holding it in the air is a costy investment.
How do robo-taxis or electric bikes for rent deal with the fuel problem? It’s an already solved issue.
However, you do have a point with malfunctions.
E-bikes and e-scooters are better, but I haven’t personally seen an infrastructure to use them unless they are personally owned and recharged at home. Are there stations for them in the US?
Robo-taxis though are their own can of worms. Discussion about their capabilities can take days.
I’m not sure how it works in the U.S., but in Europe there are stations in which users are encouraged to go to and grab a recharged battery (for a discount.) I’m guessing they have employees who do this as well…
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So do gas stations. I wouldn’t say the gas refueling problem isn’t solved because of that.
Those don’t tend to fall out of the sky when they run out of power.
Understood, but then robotaxis have run over people without the need of flying.
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The first thing you mentioned has nothing to do with fuel, which was OP’s original argument.
As for the second thing, I’ve already said I agreed with OP.
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I’m okay with being wrong. Check my comment history if you’d like in which I happily admit I’m being corrected.
But you didn’t say “depleted” or “out of fuel.” You said “broken.” And that’s different.
Can you admit that you misspoke, then?
it’s just advertising it’s not really meant to be practical you’re advertising for them good job
I’m not sure how ‘Amazon failed at doing something they promised and ended up with a shitty result’ advertises them. That’s like saying telling people that McDonalds food is full of E. Coli is an advertisement for McDonalds.
they did this for the press. it was never a serious experiment.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t spend all this money to make stupidly unnecessary and difficult drone deliveries in a small town in Texas for the press since, again, that makes them look terrible.
And yet here we are talking about them. Whether or not its thru positive means, its online presence grew with this.
Who is going to be more likely to order from Amazon after reading that their drone delivery service is shit?
That’s how advertising works. You just try to get the name of a company out there as much as possible. It doesn’t have to be gold press to be effective. I mean we are talking about one of the most successful companies in human existence.
I really don’t understand why “Amazon sucks” is a successful advertising strategy for Amazon. Why don’t other companies use that strategy? Where is the Pepsi fucked up and put out a flavor that makes people vomit campaign that works because it gets Pepsi’s name out there?
It will be good for things like medications, small electronics, and basic kitchen supplies.
Best for medications as you said.
just yeet the knife
