Everyone keeps talking about these being slower than planes, but I'm wondering if it is more interesting to compare these to cargo ships and trucks instead for

Everyone keeps talking about these being slower than planes, but I'm wondering if it is more interesting to compare these to cargo ships and trucks instead for some routes. While the cargo capacity is a lot less, these can be point to point over land or sea (no switch to trucks at a port) and these move through the air and not water, so the energy requirements should be a lot lower since air is less dense than water. The autonomous problem is far simpler than autonomous trucking. It's probably somewhat comparable for autonomous shipping. That all said 4 TEUs is far from the ~20,000 TEUs that the largest cargo ships can carry. Even if you can build something that can move 20 TEUs, that's still three orders of magnitude difference in terms of volume. For certain goods however, like moving wind farm blades and pillars, airships would be ideal.