7 ms·
" 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 traff
by 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 agoWho wakes up saying "gosh my life would be so much better if I could just buy things faster"?
- chongli 7y agoWell, 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 agoAnd 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 agoNow 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 agoSounds like the broken windows theory in action.
- SomeOldThrow 7y agoSounds racist man.
- drewmol 7y agoThe dirtbike around their property neighbors.
- khawkins 7y agoBrick and mortar stores are going out of business left and right based on the market reality that people are more than willing to wait 2 days for their items if it's cheaper and is delivered to their door. I think it's an extremely niche market, so I think it'll only be successful if you charge out the nose for the delivery.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoThey're going out of business because their inventory sucks. Every recession makes them suck more as MBAs optimize for lower quality and less selection.
- llukas 7y agoYou do not have kids, don't you?
- SomeOldThrow 7y agoI’d love to hear the connection explained.
- GordonS 7y agoI have kids, and this isn't a problem for me - not really sure what the children angle is here? I live in a small rural town in Scotland, yet Amazon and others can deliver stuff to my door the next day. In big cities, some companies even offer same-day delivery. Honestly, I don't need my stuff any quicker than that. I'm sure there are some genuinely useful niche uses for drones - for example, there was a recent HN post about a company in Africa doing drone delivery of medical supplies to remote and inaccessible locations. But I don't think it's a good idea to fill our skies with noisy, flying lithium batteries, just so you can get a pizza in 16 minutes instead of 18.
- londons_explore 7y agoDo you own a blender? How often do you use it? Do you not think that the economic and environmental cost of producing that blender is too large, considering how rarely you use it? It literally sits unused 99.99% of the time. Talk about inefficiency! If a drone service could deliver a blender in 5 minutes when you had blending to do, and take it away again when you're done, the blender could get much better utilisation by being shared with the entire town, at a lower economic and environmental cost. The same probably applies to nearly everything in your house.
- heavyset_go 7y ago"Sharing economy but with drones" is a weird choice of hills to die on in 2019.
- imihai1988 7y agoGood way of "disrupting" the blender/appliances market.
- tripzilch 7y agoIt's the people who wake up saying "gosh my life would be so much better if I could just sell things faster", they're not really looking to improve your life, just the bottom line.
- shsjxjbsbs 7y agoI wonder if we’ll see independently-owned drones doing deliveries ala Amazon’s driver-partner contractors. I suppose it depends on how much drones cost in capital and how much liability there is to make it worth it for the big cos to distance themselves that way. Employment costs probably aren’t much of an issue.
- oceanplexian 7y agoLiterally never. The FAA doesn’t mess around with this stuff. Do you think they’d trust your average Joe, who can’t even manage to keep the oil in his car changed every 10,000 miles, to maintain a 10+lb flying machine that could fall on a child or damage property? Conventional aircraft have strict maintenance and inspection intervals that require a decade of experience to work on.
- Already__Taken 7y agoYou can build your own plane... in the usa it doesn't even have to be from a kit. They just have to pass engineering inspections and categories.
- petre 7y agoAdd to that that it contains lithium batteries so it can also catch fire in mid air and set property it falls on alight.
- erikpukinskis 7y agoAs opposed to petroleum?
- todd3834 7y agoDoorDash service must vary on location. Where I live the biggest delay is not waiting for someone to accept the order but for the food to be made and for traffic on the way to your house. Usually I see dashers at restaurants waiting for food to be done.
- stOneskull 7y agoYou don't miss your sunset til it's droned
- meristem 7y agoThey are not in road traffic, they will create air traffic. Airspace management is a thing. Since at least 2010 there's been research around drone integration within airspace infrastructure management and I am bullish on software/hardware to keep all that traffic straight. Also bullish on new areas for insurance products...
- londons_explore 7y agoWith the right software, you could have a separation between drones of only a few feet. That would equate to trillions of drones flying simultaneously over just the USA and below 200feet.
- sfjailbird 7y agoWhy not just fly them over roads? The network is already there to reach any residence and it's less noisy than a car. A crash would probably not hurt anyone, and assuming the crash rate is insignificant, they would probably reduce the overall incidence of traffic accidents, considering the likely reduced number of cars (the delivery services that will be displaced).
- haasted 7y agoA crash won’t hurt anyone? Did you see the size of that drone in the article? Having that land on top of your car or MC could very well cause significant damage, I should think.
- sfjailbird 7y agoNo worse than crashing into another car, I would think.
- arkades 7y agoI know very little about automotive engineering, but I would suspect that cars are built to withstand impacts on the X-Y axis, not the Z-axis.
- oblib 7y agoUntil they can make them so quiet I don't hear them I'm going to work hard on regulating them so they cannot bug the hell out of me and cause damage with they malfunction.
- dannyr 7y agoHave you heard of cars? They make noise and cause damages too.
- adrianN 7y agoMaybe oblib is also trying to regulate cars.
- oblib 7y agoI was beat to that action before I was born and in fact, by that time auto makers were advertising that their cars were were quiet. Luxury cars like Cadillacs were so quiet you couldn't even hear them running when standing outside right next to them and even quieter inside. Try cutting off the "mufflers" on your car and see how far you get before getting pulled over a gifted a citation for it.
- drewmol 7y agoI looked into cars from your comment and it seems working hard toward regulation is the right approach.
- optimiz3 7y agoMany cities regulate maximum vehicle noise levels.
- hrktb 7y agoIt only impacts individual vehicle’s maximum ability, not counting the horns and other sound warnings. It’s still a hell of a noise when you have intermitent traffic mixed with ponctual congestion.
- 7y ago
- meheleventyone 7y agoAre deliveries right now being fulfilled by drones flying to a location being loaded up and then flown to the destination? Or are the good being sent to a central location and then dispatched?
- Udik 7y ago> They can scale up with demand much more easily Have you though about how many packages of the size and weight one of these drones can carry fit in the smallest delivery lorry? Judging from the video, I'd say one thousand is a good estimate. It means you need one thousand drone trips, both ways, to deliver what fits in a few square metres. How does this scale? And then think of all those drones in pouring rain, or hail, or strong winds, or just at night in areas with vertical obstacles. It's just absurd.
- tigershark 7y agoThey are not allowed to fly in the night and I guess they will avoid days with strong winds.