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Wing's trial here in Canberra has felt a little unremarkable. People don't really talk about it, apart from the occasional local news piece about someone compla

Wing's trial here in Canberra has felt a little unremarkable. People don't really talk about it, apart from the occasional local news piece about someone complaining about the noise. I'm quite interested to see how much people buy into it in the US. From a consumer point of view it seems they're directly competing with established services (eg. Uber Eats), and the main differentiator is a gimmick.

readhn 7y ago
Many big things were ignored at first and many thought of them as just another fad: 1. internet 2. PC then Smart phone 3. digital camera 4. bitcoin ... the list is long. continuous battery innovation and expanding flying range / lift power will make drone delivery a regular every day occurrence, just like uber service or amazon next day delivery service have become. there are so many ideas and applications that are just waiting to be unleashed...!!! we live in truly amazing times!
- dclusin 7y ago
  Bitcoin still hasn't been disproven to be a fad :)
  - tempsolution 7y ago
    And it never will be :D. There was never any need for crypto currency to begin with and pretty much all of them fail to deliver on their core promise of decentralization. If they do deliver on that promise, they are so slow that the idea of global deployment is ridiculous... The core idea of crypto currency (i.e. byzantine fault tolerance) is 2000 years old. The fact that this happens now already demonstrates that there never was any need for this and there won't be.
    - s1artibartfast 7y ago
      >There was never any need for crypto currency Of course there was and still is. The three main purposes as I see them are as follows: 1) International money transfer free of regulatory oversight. 2) Anonymous purchase and money laundering 3) Decentralized currency free of government manipulation - Bitcoin falls short of this. Cryptocurrency is a great solution for all of these needs. Of course I agree that most currencies add little or no value to their core product, especially the ICO crowd.
      - grepthisab 7y ago
        This is like that episode of the Simpsons when Apu is getting his citizenship and taking the quiz, they ask him the cause of the American Revolution and he starts going through a list with nuanced analysis. The testmaster stops him and tells him: "Just say slavery." There were some other very minor causes, but slavery was the biggest. Similarly, you can just say illegal purchases. The other things have been largely debunked. Interestingly, you didn't even mention the giant primary use case of buying illegal things.
        blacksmith_tb 7y ago
        Er, wasn't the one-word cause of the American Revolution "taxation" ? (The one-word cause of the American Civil War would probably be "slavery", though).
        dragonwriter 7y ago
        > Er, wasn't the one-word cause of the American Revolution "taxation" ? No, “disenfranchisement”. Read the Declaration, it was about usurpations of the right of the people to govern themselves. “No...without representation” is the key part, not “taxation”. That's been inverted for propaganda purposes by modern anti-tax activists. But, in a any case, “slavery” would have to be the Civil War, the Texas Revolution, or—indirectly, by way of the previous item—the Mexican-American War.
        s1artibartfast 7y ago
        I think black market purchases fall pretty clearly under #2 above.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Oh wow. Did you just compare Bitcoin to the internet itself? Cameras too?! Please, get out of the crypto bubble.
enjo 7y ago
" and the main differentiator is a gimmick. My bet is that drones will be able to service these deliveries MUCH more quickly than humans. They're not in traffic. They can scale up with demand much more easily (much of the wait for Door Dash et al. is just getting someone available to make the delivery). Those advantages even get more pronounced with distance (up to whatever serviceable distance drones will have). I'm very bullish on the idea of drone delivery. I'm hopeful that it will empower smaller businesses to compete with Amazon prime even, but that's probably a pipe dream.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  Who wakes up saying "gosh my life would be so much better if I could just buy things faster"?
  - chongli 7y ago
    Well, we’re talking about food delivery here. I’d order food much more often if it arrived quickly and thus was hotter when it got here.
    - oblib 7y ago
      And with no cares or worries that the noise would bug the hell out of your neighbors? Come on... this is an awful idea.
      - oh_sigh 7y ago
        Now would that be my neighbors who drive a dirtbike around their property for 6 hours a day, or the neighbors who tie their dog up outside at night and let it bark constantly at 2am?
        catalogia 7y ago
        Sounds like the broken windows theory in action.
        7y ago
petra 7y ago
Drone deliveries may be significantly cheaper to the company. Consumers already get "free" shipping, so they don't notice that. But at some point, they'll see lower prices for products.
- grepthisab 7y ago
  I'm really, really skeptical that if Amazon (or whoever) suddenly finds efficiencies through drone usage then those efficiencies and lower costs for them would translate into lower prices for consumers...
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    Unless both Amazon AND Walmart/Google/Uber/whoever ALSO find those same efficiencies, and compete...
jfoster 7y ago
Have you used it? From what I can tell, they are servicing areas remote enough that they may not even have Uber Eats. Even if they do, the time it takes for a car to navigate roads and reach you will be many times that of a drone that can fly over a hill and cover hundreds of metres of challenging terrain in about a minute. I am sceptical about whether this has applications within a busy city (buildings become a problem and safety becomes a concern) but I think they're going to be perfect for areas a bit outside cities where deliveries don't exist or the quality of delivery service isn't so good.
- cavisne 7y ago
  At least in Canberra the area they are serving is not really remote. It’s actually quite hilarious that their “remote” area is the outer suburbs of Australia’s capital city (which is to be fair quite small)
- lallysingh 7y ago
  Christiansburg, VA is the "slightly bigger town" next to Virginia Tech.
- zifnab06 7y ago
  I also wonder how this will work in large cities. Packages to my condo are delivered to a non Amazon locker in our parking garage, my building doesn't have a spot where drones could even make deliveries safely. Residents lack roof access. Packages left outdoors get stolen in a few minutes, which happens more often than not with Amazon's gig economy delivery drivers. They seem incapable of delivering packages to our locker, let alone a pile by the mailboxes. They're left outside the front door way too often.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
    Amazon's drivers probably could deliver to your locker if Amazon didn't relentlessly surveil and pressure them to do things as fast as possible.
    - 7y ago
sharemywin 7y ago
Am I missing something? Uber eats needs to pay a driver. Let's assume 20 minutes per delivery for a driver. At $15/hr your at $5 cost per delivery. Plus no need to tip a drone. Also, a drone could operate 24/7 so at 4 oclock in the morning if there was only one delivery in an hour it pays for itself. Plus the licensing happens at the federal level, so you don't have to deal with local laws.
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  The drones still have pilots monitoring them, so they're probably not going to run 24/7, and the pilots probably need training so they make more than $15/hr. But the license allows multiple drones per pilot so overall labor costs per delivery are lower.
- jsjohnst 7y ago
  > Plus the licensing happens at the federal level, so you don't have to deal with local laws. That’s definitely not true, you very much have to deal with it at all levels of government, federal, state, county, city, etc.
- oceanplexian 7y ago
  The drone still needs a pilot. Someone certified will still need to do a preflight inspection to make sure there aren’t cracks in the prop, loose wiring, issues with the frame, that the batteries aren’t exhibiting any dangerous behavior (Puffed lithium cells), etc. Nothing in the mechanical world is perfect and you’re going to need some oversight of that.
  - lallysingh 7y ago
    Webcams in the drone bay with self diagnostics for internals, in the roof of a shopping center with fiber to a cheap control center a few msec away.
    - Jyaif 7y ago
      No idea why you are getting downvoted, automatic inspection is obviously where we are going.
nopinsight 7y ago
They might plan to replace pilots with AI-based systems plus weak human supervision long-term. The idea is similar to what Waymo is working on for their AVs. Relative to autonomous vehicles, this has less complications from other drivers, but more from wind, rain, gravity, possibly battery life, etc. The areas coverable by AVs and autonomous drones could differ given their different challenges.
ehnto 7y ago
Asking because you are a city it has been trialed in, but how does it handle a multi-tenant house deliver? Like a two story unit block. Does it just drop it on the sidewalk? How do they handle busy sidewalks or parking lots?

readhn 7y ago

Many big things were ignored at first and many thought of them as just another fad: 1. internet 2. PC then Smart phone 3. digital camera 4. bitcoin ... the list is long. continuous battery innovation and expanding flying range / lift power will make drone delivery a regular every day occurrence, just like uber service or amazon next day delivery service have become. there are so many ideas and applications that are just waiting to be unleashed...!!! we live in truly amazing times!

dclusin 7y ago
Bitcoin still hasn't been disproven to be a fad :)
- tempsolution 7y ago
  And it never will be :D. There was never any need for crypto currency to begin with and pretty much all of them fail to deliver on their core promise of decentralization. If they do deliver on that promise, they are so slow that the idea of global deployment is ridiculous... The core idea of crypto currency (i.e. byzantine fault tolerance) is 2000 years old. The fact that this happens now already demonstrates that there never was any need for this and there won't be.
  - s1artibartfast 7y ago
    >There was never any need for crypto currency Of course there was and still is. The three main purposes as I see them are as follows: 1) International money transfer free of regulatory oversight. 2) Anonymous purchase and money laundering 3) Decentralized currency free of government manipulation - Bitcoin falls short of this. Cryptocurrency is a great solution for all of these needs. Of course I agree that most currencies add little or no value to their core product, especially the ICO crowd.
    - grepthisab 7y ago
      This is like that episode of the Simpsons when Apu is getting his citizenship and taking the quiz, they ask him the cause of the American Revolution and he starts going through a list with nuanced analysis. The testmaster stops him and tells him: "Just say slavery." There were some other very minor causes, but slavery was the biggest. Similarly, you can just say illegal purchases. The other things have been largely debunked. Interestingly, you didn't even mention the giant primary use case of buying illegal things.
      - blacksmith_tb 7y ago
        Er, wasn't the one-word cause of the American Revolution "taxation" ? (The one-word cause of the American Civil War would probably be "slavery", though).
        dragonwriter 7y ago
        > Er, wasn't the one-word cause of the American Revolution "taxation" ? No, “disenfranchisement”. Read the Declaration, it was about usurpations of the right of the people to govern themselves. “No...without representation” is the key part, not “taxation”. That's been inverted for propaganda purposes by modern anti-tax activists. But, in a any case, “slavery” would have to be the Civil War, the Texas Revolution, or—indirectly, by way of the previous item—the Mexican-American War.
      - s1artibartfast 7y ago
        I think black market purchases fall pretty clearly under #2 above.
cameronbrown 7y ago
Oh wow. Did you just compare Bitcoin to the internet itself? Cameras too?! Please, get out of the crypto bubble.

enjo 7y ago

" and the main differentiator is a gimmick. My bet is that drones will be able to service these deliveries MUCH more quickly than humans. They're not in traffic. They can scale up with demand much more easily (much of the wait for Door Dash et al. is just getting someone available to make the delivery). Those advantages even get more pronounced with distance (up to whatever serviceable distance drones will have). I'm very bullish on the idea of drone delivery. I'm hopeful that it will empower smaller businesses to compete with Amazon prime even, but that's probably a pipe dream.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago
Who wakes up saying "gosh my life would be so much better if I could just buy things faster"?
- chongli 7y ago
  Well, we’re talking about food delivery here. I’d order food much more often if it arrived quickly and thus was hotter when it got here.
  - oblib 7y ago
    And with no cares or worries that the noise would bug the hell out of your neighbors? Come on... this is an awful idea.
    - oh_sigh 7y ago
      Now would that be my neighbors who drive a dirtbike around their property for 6 hours a day, or the neighbors who tie their dog up outside at night and let it bark constantly at 2am?
      - catalogia 7y ago
        Sounds like the broken windows theory in action.
      - 7y ago

petra 7y ago

Drone deliveries may be significantly cheaper to the company. Consumers already get "free" shipping, so they don't notice that. But at some point, they'll see lower prices for products.

grepthisab 7y ago
I'm really, really skeptical that if Amazon (or whoever) suddenly finds efficiencies through drone usage then those efficiencies and lower costs for them would translate into lower prices for consumers...
- DuskStar 7y ago
  Unless both Amazon AND Walmart/Google/Uber/whoever ALSO find those same efficiencies, and compete...

jfoster 7y ago

Have you used it? From what I can tell, they are servicing areas remote enough that they may not even have Uber Eats. Even if they do, the time it takes for a car to navigate roads and reach you will be many times that of a drone that can fly over a hill and cover hundreds of metres of challenging terrain in about a minute. I am sceptical about whether this has applications within a busy city (buildings become a problem and safety becomes a concern) but I think they're going to be perfect for areas a bit outside cities where deliveries don't exist or the quality of delivery service isn't so good.

cavisne 7y ago
At least in Canberra the area they are serving is not really remote. It’s actually quite hilarious that their “remote” area is the outer suburbs of Australia’s capital city (which is to be fair quite small)
lallysingh 7y ago
Christiansburg, VA is the "slightly bigger town" next to Virginia Tech.
zifnab06 7y ago
I also wonder how this will work in large cities. Packages to my condo are delivered to a non Amazon locker in our parking garage, my building doesn't have a spot where drones could even make deliveries safely. Residents lack roof access. Packages left outdoors get stolen in a few minutes, which happens more often than not with Amazon's gig economy delivery drivers. They seem incapable of delivering packages to our locker, let alone a pile by the mailboxes. They're left outside the front door way too often.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  Amazon's drivers probably could deliver to your locker if Amazon didn't relentlessly surveil and pressure them to do things as fast as possible.
  - 7y ago

sharemywin 7y ago

Am I missing something? Uber eats needs to pay a driver. Let's assume 20 minutes per delivery for a driver. At $15/hr your at $5 cost per delivery. Plus no need to tip a drone. Also, a drone could operate 24/7 so at 4 oclock in the morning if there was only one delivery in an hour it pays for itself. Plus the licensing happens at the federal level, so you don't have to deal with local laws.

Mathnerd314 7y ago
The drones still have pilots monitoring them, so they're probably not going to run 24/7, and the pilots probably need training so they make more than $15/hr. But the license allows multiple drones per pilot so overall labor costs per delivery are lower.
jsjohnst 7y ago
> Plus the licensing happens at the federal level, so you don't have to deal with local laws. That’s definitely not true, you very much have to deal with it at all levels of government, federal, state, county, city, etc.
oceanplexian 7y ago
The drone still needs a pilot. Someone certified will still need to do a preflight inspection to make sure there aren’t cracks in the prop, loose wiring, issues with the frame, that the batteries aren’t exhibiting any dangerous behavior (Puffed lithium cells), etc. Nothing in the mechanical world is perfect and you’re going to need some oversight of that.
- lallysingh 7y ago
  Webcams in the drone bay with self diagnostics for internals, in the roof of a shopping center with fiber to a cheap control center a few msec away.
  - Jyaif 7y ago
    No idea why you are getting downvoted, automatic inspection is obviously where we are going.

nopinsight 7y ago

They might plan to replace pilots with AI-based systems plus weak human supervision long-term. The idea is similar to what Waymo is working on for their AVs. Relative to autonomous vehicles, this has less complications from other drivers, but more from wind, rain, gravity, possibly battery life, etc. The areas coverable by AVs and autonomous drones could differ given their different challenges.

ehnto 7y ago

Asking because you are a city it has been trialed in, but how does it handle a multi-tenant house deliver? Like a two story unit block. Does it just drop it on the sidewalk? How do they handle busy sidewalks or parking lots?