The big question for all of the companies that want to be the last mile: can they run sufficiently profitable businesses without classifying their workers as 1099 employees? Mark my words: most of the "on-demand" startups that are relying on contract workers are not going to be able to defeat the misclassification lawsuits they're facing. Some might have the funds to delay the inevitable by strategically settling the…
I believe it will all end up owned by Uber (or similar) using self-driving cars. The vehicle is easily loaded at the supplier, and then you unlock a lockbox when it arrives to do the delivery. Dynamic pricing can be used to direct demand to low hours (eg delivery is $5 at midday but $2 at 2pm). The remaining question is how soon. A company trying to make use of a self driving vehicle for most hours of the day across…
Regulation is going to be the thing holding everything back. I'm not talking about the disparate and protectionist taxi regulations that Uber just ignored until they were successful; I'm talking about real safety issues like air traffic control when everyone and their mother is flying things over populated areas. The regulatory environment around how all these drones will communicate needs to be developed and standardized -- that alone will take at least a decade because adequate bureaucracies need to be built up to develop, steward and enforce the regulations. Self-driving cars are even further off because they're going to be carrying human passengers.
We're at a point where the technology has overrun our ability to regulate it, and there really are things that need to be regulated -- Who is liable if two drones crash over your house and damage your roof? Do you force drone operators to carry insurance to cover damages in the event of mechanical failure? How do drones report their position to each other to avoid collisions? What data formats, units and auditing is required when communicating with other drones? There are thousands of questions, and none of them have even made it into the sphere of political discourse, much less legislative action. Current politicians don't even understand this stuff, so we have to wait for people who do to become old enough to get elected.
I'd say we're at least 15 years off from this future, if not 30. We'll probably see it happen elsewhere in the world much sooner than it will in the US and Europe. So any business starting up today will not be able to rely on self-driving cars or autonomous delivery to prop up their business model: it has to work with human delivery or it won't survive long enough to make it to the drone era. And for the ones who do, it'll become a race to the bottom with razor-thin margins.