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Hopefully driverless vehicles can make this redundant. I'd prefer quiet electric robots zipping around the streets to noisy drones in the air. What problem is

Hopefully driverless vehicles can make this redundant. I'd prefer quiet electric robots zipping around the streets to noisy drones in the air. What problem is drone delivery actually solving? How often are people sitting at home and need a delivery dispatched right now. Food delivery seems to be the only compelling use case. Maybe the occasional "out of toilet paper" emergency? Or perhaps on demand delivery becomes so easy that it changes people's behaviour to JIT all their shopping.

fragmede 7y ago
Autonomous drone delivery "solves" many of the issues when compared to having the FedEx/UPS truck and a driver drive to my location, not the least of which is the small army of locally-based drivers who want to be paid in local wages. Depending on who you ask, driverless vehicles are either right around the corner, or 5-10 years away. Meanwhile, drone delivery is possible, right now, and the airspace above my house is generally empty. (It's being done "in prod" for medicine delivery in Rwanda. iirc those are not autonomous though.) Like delivery options that exist now, I wouldn't expect drone delivery to be instantaneous either.
- dchichkov 7y ago
  The issue with an eVTOL is that you have an unobstructed noise source at altitude. Cities are not designed for this. In a well-designed city noise sources would be under the ground or at a ground level, behind a sound barrier. They wouldn't be placed at altitude.