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It's still a question of capacity. Any drone deliveries that need to be made will take away from other delivery capacity. Given that standard vehicle delivery
by crusso 13y ago
It's still a question of capacity. Any drone deliveries that need to be made will take away from other delivery capacity. Given that standard vehicle delivery will be much more time consuming and much less parallelized than the drone delivery, drone outages will place a thrashing level of load on standard delivery unless a great deal of unutilized standard delivery capacity is kept idle most of the time.
That costs money.
[edit: typo fixed]
- toyg 13y agoThat's more of a question for FedEx and UPS. Of course existing contracts with Amazon will require tweaking, but I don't see how drone-outage periods will be much different from other volume spikes.
- dannypgh 13y agoThat doesn't seem like a difficult problem to solve. Delivery isn't free, even if the customer isn't the one paying for it. If standard delivery becomes more expensive due to the weather-linked bursty nature of the load requiring additional provisioning, you just need to charge more for standard delivery. Which I'd expect a company like amazon to implement as a fair-weather discount, given the propensity of humans to be loss averse.
- bagacrap 13y agoIsn't that already the case when bad weather strikes? Delivery trucks take longer to drive around in bad rain, or blizzards, or unpredictable traffic (resulting from accidents or road closures). The slower the truck, the more of them you need.