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Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

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Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#151

Post by leni536 »

hooloovoo_zoo wrote: post #58
mapt wrote: post #22

Here's what I think is more likely: A small regional airport is taken over by Amazon. They build hangars and warehouses onsite. It's ramped up to land and fly a big turbine-powered mothership every five minutes. The warehouse dispatches packages to stacks of delivery drones like the one pictured in the video. The mothership loads the delivery drones in order. The motherships take off regularly, and then as the mother…

I suspect this will be limited to urban areas, like all of Amazon's premium delivery options. 30 minutes of flight time at 30 mph means you could cover the entire city of Houston (the largest city by area in the U.S.) with about 4 warehouses. I think you're much better off trying to increase the range of your drones than using carriers because your coverage area is quadratic with your drones' range but linear with yo…

> coverage area is quadratic with your drones' range but linear with your number of carriers.

How running cost scales with drones' range? If it's also quadratic or worse then there is no reason to increase it.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#152

Post by ck2 »

hiddencost wrote: post #85
ck2 wrote: post #34

They are going to have to go back and update all the movies that attempt to guess the future. Apparently there are going to be a bunch of drones flying around delivering to people in the suburbs. Looks very cool but in the real world so many things can go wrong, I am sure people are going to intercept and either damage or steal the drones.

Haha. You must live somewhere pretty crazy if you expect that much violence and theft. People don't randomly attack everything. Sure, there'll be some losses, but that's true of any business, plus you'll have the theft on camera and just stop delivering to those neighborhoods. Compare the cost of drone loss to UPS' cost due to accidents. It would take an insane amount of effort to steal that many drones.

Yes I live in a low-incoming neighborhood and everything gets destroyed by unsupervised kids and teenagers that run around after school before parents get home (and some even after parents are home).

But I also live near college student housing and they pretty much do something similar with their drinking and partying.

Just like UPS cannot leave packages for me here, I couldn't get drone delivery either.

Not everyone can afford or wants to live in suburbs.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#153

Post by ghaff »

darkxanthos wrote: post #66
alooPotato wrote: post #65

I'm really curious how this beats a amazon owned delivery truck? Serious question. Economically and at scale, it seems like both the truck and drone are actually pretty cheap. Speed of delivery and at scale, the only way the drone is faster is if there is a warehouse in each city and your item is stocked. Otherwise, the bottleneck in delivery time is the long distance shipping. Feasibility and at scale, the truck see…

With automated drones and Amazon brick and mortar stores the idea of large warehouses could be challenged. They could shift packages in an automated fashion to areas with more probable demand. Drones are crazy cheap as well. I can imagine hundreds of these in the sky at once in Chicago if not thousands.

>I can imagine hundreds of these in the sky at once in Chicago if not thousands.

Which sounds like an utterly horrifying scenario. It's not so much that I can't imagine this sort of delivery not working in some scenarios as that I have a lot of trouble imagining it working at scale.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#154

Post by TaylorGood »

dba7dba wrote: post #144
mnglkhn2 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe your scenarios (especially the "truck dispenser") address the market Amazon has in mind: the suburbia. If you notice, both video examples show the drone delivering at a house. It seems obvious that an urban setting is difficult to address. And actually delivery costs are higher in the suburbs, due to population spread, than in the cities. The interesting thing is how do UPS/FedEx/USPS feel about this, consi…

'The interesting thing is how do UPS/FedEx/USPS feel about this, considering that Amazon is aiming to "evolve" their business model?' UPS/FedEx/USPS can feel whatever they want but there's not a darn thing they can do about it.

What Fedex does in my neighborhood I haven't seen prior.. they recently brought a gas-powered golf cart and the driver uses his truck as the "warehouse" and makes rounds all day.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#155

Post by jml3on »

dba7dba wrote: post #144
mnglkhn2 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe your scenarios (especially the "truck dispenser") address the market Amazon has in mind: the suburbia. If you notice, both video examples show the drone delivering at a house. It seems obvious that an urban setting is difficult to address. And actually delivery costs are higher in the suburbs, due to population spread, than in the cities. The interesting thing is how do UPS/FedEx/USPS feel about this, consi…

'The interesting thing is how do UPS/FedEx/USPS feel about this, considering that Amazon is aiming to "evolve" their business model?' UPS/FedEx/USPS can feel whatever they want but there's not a darn thing they can do about it.

I'd guess they'll be elated. Delivering packages in the far reaches of suburbia (and beyond) is probably costing them money, as it takes a lot of truck&driver time to deliver a single package. If we assume they maintain their hold on urban deliveries and let amazon take care of the suburbia ones; their margin will go up.

Also, I'll point out that in my area of suburbia, UPS/Fedex sometimes deliver to USPS and let USPS do the last mile. it's not hard to imagine they'd deliver to an amazon base station where robots & drones would take over.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#156

Post by giarc »

ghaff wrote: post #89
giarc wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are much, much more expensive then drones. Minimum wage, benefits, delivery vehicle maintenance, insurance, etc etc etc.

Yes, people are more expensive. In that they're paid wages. Others things you list are common to automated platforms. But people are also good in dealing with imprecise situations that are common with package delivery. I actually believe Amazon is seriously interested in pursuing this. I also believe it's largely stupid.

Do you know why medic-vac helicopters exist? Not necessarily because they move faster than an ambulance, but because they can travel as the crow flies. Even if a drone and a human delivery driver cost the same, a human could never come close to the delivery speed of a drone simply because they can fly over stop signs, stop lights, inefficient road design and get to the home the fastest. And for Amazon, that is the value, getting the package to the customer as quick as possible.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#157

Post by ghaff »

giarc wrote: post #156
ghaff wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people are more expensive. In that they're paid wages. Others things you list are common to automated platforms. But people are also good in dealing with imprecise situations that are common with package delivery. I actually believe Amazon is seriously interested in pursuing this. I also believe it's largely stupid.

Do you know why medic-vac helicopters exist? Not necessarily because they move faster than an ambulance, but because they can travel as the crow flies. Even if a drone and a human delivery driver cost the same, a human could never come close to the delivery speed of a drone simply because they can fly over stop signs, stop lights, inefficient road design and get to the home the fastest. And for Amazon, that is the va…

Yes and medic-vac helicopters also exist because they're responding to genuine emergencies which justifies both the expense and any externalities (e.g. noise and marginal danger) associated with their flying over houses etc. to save a few minutes. Sending flocks of flying vehicles over houses to deliver cables or pizzas because people need them RIGHT NOW is not the same.

I do see scenarios where drones make sense but I have a lot of trouble envisioning people being fine with the skies of suburbia being filled with drones all the time.

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#158

Post by vidarh »

anon4this1 wrote: post #38

Does anyone else think that underground tunnels are a superior way to solve the last few miles problem? Tunnels about 1 foot in diameter with little wheeled vehicles pushing around payloads of takeaway food, groceries , parcels at reasonable speed with control computers determining routing and stopping collisions. A functioning network of this type would be more valuable than power or cable utility networks, and hori…

I wonder what the economy of dealing with stuck packages, flooding, rodents etc. would be...

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#159

Post by JoeAltmaier »

ghaff wrote: post #157
giarc wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know why medic-vac helicopters exist? Not necessarily because they move faster than an ambulance, but because they can travel as the crow flies. Even if a drone and a human delivery driver cost the same, a human could never come close to the delivery speed of a drone simply because they can fly over stop signs, stop lights, inefficient road design and get to the home the fastest. And for Amazon, that is the va…

Yes and medic-vac helicopters also exist because they're responding to genuine emergencies which justifies both the expense and any externalities (e.g. noise and marginal danger) associated with their flying over houses etc. to save a few minutes. Sending flocks of flying vehicles over houses to deliver cables or pizzas because people need them RIGHT NOW is not the same. I do see scenarios where drones make sense but…

They are not very loud; they have a smaller impact than a UPS truck or a pizza delivery guy racing against time. They will get lots of vehicles off the road. I see folks embracing drone delivery as a solution!

Re: Amazon Shows Off New Prime Air Drone with Hybrid Design

#160

Post by vidarh »

cbhl wrote: post #49
mapt wrote: post #22

Here's what I think is more likely: A small regional airport is taken over by Amazon. They build hangars and warehouses onsite. It's ramped up to land and fly a big turbine-powered mothership every five minutes. The warehouse dispatches packages to stacks of delivery drones like the one pictured in the video. The mothership loads the delivery drones in order. The motherships take off regularly, and then as the mother…

It's worth noting that Amazon already has warehouses in major urban centers for Prime Now: Nashville, Richmond, San Diego, Portland, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco. It seems plausible that by the time (i.e. in a few years) Amazon gets regulatory support for its delivery drones in a suburban community that it'll have saturated urban delivery markets in the US and will be ready to build warehouses in the sub…

Internationally too. Three major ones in London so far, used to support Prime Now as well as same day delivery for a large proportion of "normal" Prime.
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