The Economics of Drone Delivery
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The Economics of Drone Delivery
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Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery
#2what about delivery truck as drone carrier?
when the truck is close to destination, drone(s) are detached to drop/pick package(s), only to return to the truck after finishing the work. this eliminates truck stops.
imagine a flying bee hive
Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery
#3I'ld add that drone delivery for takeout would be a nice win, given that most restaurants that deliver are already limited to nearby locations and speed is desired.
With a proviso that it might be easier in a suburban situation to begin (given a lawn to drop off the goods).
Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery
#4what about delivery truck as drone carrier? when the truck is close to destination, drone(s) are detached to drop/pick package(s), only to return to the truck after finishing the work. this eliminates truck stops. imagine a flying bee hive
I would think that once you're sending out trucks anyway, there isn't much even potential win in layering a complex air delivery system on top of that. In addition, you're adding another source of latency and, to the degree that drone delivery makes any sense at all, I expect it would be used for very time sensitive material.
Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery
#5what about delivery truck as drone carrier? when the truck is close to destination, drone(s) are detached to drop/pick package(s), only to return to the truck after finishing the work. this eliminates truck stops. imagine a flying bee hive
I would think that once you're sending out trucks anyway, there isn't much even potential win in layering a complex air delivery system on top of that. In addition, you're adding another source of latency and, to the degree that drone delivery makes any sense at all, I expect it would be used for very time sensitive material.
But drones are much more range- and speed-limited than trucks are. It might very well make sense to drive a truck from New Jersey to Manhattan, or from Irving to Plano, and then let the drones spread out.
Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery
#6I'ld add that drone delivery for takeout would be a nice win, given that most restaurants that deliver are already limited to nearby locations and speed is desired. With a proviso that it might be easier in a suburban situation to begin (given a lawn to drop off the goods).
The thing is that quick, low-price takeout delivery to a limited radius of households is pretty much a solved problem. I suppose one could imagine more industrialized takeout-only restaurants in suburban locations but, again,one could create such a chain today and indeed we have them for say pizza. They're not very good but they're big businesses.
Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery
#7what about delivery truck as drone carrier? when the truck is close to destination, drone(s) are detached to drop/pick package(s), only to return to the truck after finishing the work. this eliminates truck stops. imagine a flying bee hive
I would think that once you're sending out trucks anyway, there isn't much even potential win in layering a complex air delivery system on top of that. In addition, you're adding another source of latency and, to the degree that drone delivery makes any sense at all, I expect it would be used for very time sensitive material.
We know that much of a delivery network's cost is the last mile, but I'd be interested in the costs of the last 100 yards. Suddenly, instead of one driver/one truck per neighborhood per day it's one stop per neighborhood per day. They can stop once or twice in the neighborhood, load drones with packages and then drones do all the deliveries. If you even have a separate "loader" in the back, you can have the driver jump out and make the few targeted heavy package (20+lbs) deliveries.
Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery
#8what about delivery truck as drone carrier? when the truck is close to destination, drone(s) are detached to drop/pick package(s), only to return to the truck after finishing the work. this eliminates truck stops. imagine a flying bee hive
I would think that once you're sending out trucks anyway, there isn't much even potential win in layering a complex air delivery system on top of that. In addition, you're adding another source of latency and, to the degree that drone delivery makes any sense at all, I expect it would be used for very time sensitive material.
Maybe not trucks specifically, but I would imagine that having the notion of mobile or temporary drone launch points would help a lot during busy times - e.g. the week before christmas.
I watched all the major carriers sending out multiple delivery dispatches a day through my neighborhood. To the point that the bottleneck appeared to be concurrency issues on driver time (as I tracked a few packages through the various systems). For my family, many of the packages fell within reasonable drone parameters and a lot of them had a significant pause time at local delivery base (e.g. UPS truck loading center or post ofice). I imagine a steady stream of drones from a temporary drone base would help lighten this load. Imagine sending a semi-truck that operates as a drone base to a big parking lot, appropriately located to be in a delivery dense area. A handful of employees does piloting and battery swapping and drone loading, while a delivery truck brings packages to the temporary hub. When the busy and/or overload time is over, the truck can go back home, or on to the next place expecting an overload. It wouldn't take a lot of saved overtime and seasonal labor costs to make this a win.
edit: I would also imagine that a lot of driver time during christmas anyway is wasted on traffic issues, part of which are compounded by them! Drones wouldn't have this so much.
Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery
#9I wonder how energy costs would factor into these economics. A couple of thoughts off the top of my head:
* drones run on electricity - they are less energy efficient than ground vehicles, but this can be offset by cheapness of electricity - particularly in areas where battery recharge could be done by solar or wind.
* The large banks of batteries required to make the drones economically efficient (I imagine it would be cheapest to have a couple sets of batteries per drone and swap them out to allow continuous drone operation, rather than recharging each individual drone) might be useful for secondary operations when delivery periods are slow - e.g. using the bank of solar charged batteries to power night operations when the next day's deliveries are going to be slow.
Similarly I wonder how having an army of drones out in the world might have secondary economic impacts for the operators:
* For a small power budget, the drones could be equipped with additional sensors to gather data on various things and provide a sensor stream for 3rd party purchase.
* the video information I would imagine they already stream back could provide all sorts of benefit - selling the video to the news if a drone is in the area of a newsworthy event.
* similar to the previous point, but for traffic info.
Re: The Economics of Drone Delivery
#10> Instead, the real challenge is the regulatory environment. The FAA has banned all commercial uses of drones in the U.S.
I always don't understand this reasoning. There are tons of other markets, many of which Amazon is active in. Being successful there without any problems would be the perfect argument to also allow it in the US.