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The economics are definitely not there yet. The insurance alone would make it prohibitively expensive. Then you need a lot of infrastructure due to low range. L
by rplnt 12y ago
The economics are definitely not there yet. The insurance alone would make it prohibitively expensive. Then you need a lot of infrastructure due to low range. Light drones also can't fly when it's too windy, too rainy, too cold. And they can only carry a very small subset of usual shipments (limited size and weight).
Automated cars on the other hand...
- Perdition 12y agoI can imagine all the people complaining about how they have been waiting for three hours for an Amazon drone delivery while a hurricane rages on outside.
- xur17 12y agoI see the drones as a last mile delivery solution. Rather than flying the drones all the way from the distribution centers to peoples' houses, they could drive their trucks out to your neighborhood, and then release a set of drones to deliver packages the 'last mile'. This would allow them to deliver a bunch of packages at once without the driver getting out of the truck, and larger packages could still be hand delivered for the time being. Also, I'd imagine that the drones would be (remotely) human driven at least the first few times they drop off a package, so they can learn where to drop off the package (similar to how Google handles training their self driving cars). After that, they could drop it off automatically, but hand off control to a human if the environment looks too different.
- dman 12y agoHowre they going to solve the pet problem? I can see curious cats / dogs trying to have a go at the drones.
- flinty 12y agoalso most of northeast will be blocked off for multiple months in winter due to snow accumulation on streets and on people's doors