Amazon to deliver in 30 mins - BBC trials for delivering goods by drones
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
In my recent experience the actual physical delivery process is only about one-third of the overall waiting time. But I suppose warehouse processes are less PR-friendly than sexy drone stories.
In contrast vendors selling through ebay consistently have the item inserted into the delivery system on the same day.
Two-hour delivery is free if you have Prime. One hour is about £5.
On the normal Amazon.co.uk Prime, they dispatch same-day and always deliver next day, usually by ~1pm.
It does illustrate why in my experience non-Prime customers are drifting away from Amazon, though. They're sharpening their localised and top-tier delivery experience whilst seemingly letting 'ordinary' orders languish. Whereas I can go to another retailer, or straight to the manufacturer, and have my order on my carpet before Amazon even put it in a delivery lorry.
https://services.amazon.co.uk/services/fulfilment-by-amazon/...
My conspiracy theory is that Amazon is making non-Prime purchasing - where you pay a one-off fee - a worse experience so that you'll be "forced" to try Prime. Or at the very least they put non-Prime customers to the back of the warehouse queue more often. All it has done is turned me off Amazon, and I try to buy things someplace else if I can. It helps that I don't live in the US or UK, and our provincial Amazon is a much worse offering compared to those 2.
Having my frequent orders reliably arrive on the next day is worth the subscription. If you don't think so, you'll have to be patient. I think that's how Amazon sees it too.
Let's keep our priorities straight, if needed through drone taxes.
> unwanted noise and danger
I'd be interested in knowing the noise, danger and pollution that comes from regular (or rush) deliveries.
Difficult to imagine a case for this delivery method other than pure instant gratification.
Trucks can't deliver hundreds of boxes at a time, they can deliver hundreds of boxes during a day of driving. The quora post linked below suggests between 200-500 a day. Depending on length of flight, you might be able to replace a truck that delivers 200 packages with 5 drones delivering 4 packages an hour, while limiting flights to 10 hours a day. A huge swarm isn't necessarily needed.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-packages-does-a-UPS-delivery-...
As for danger and traffic, I'd be surprised if low-altitude air traffic, air collisions and falling objects didn't become an issue in a world where delivery drones were commonplace.
It stands to reason that rolling boxes in bulk around on wheels should be a lot more energy efficient and reliable than flying individual boxes around in the air. I'm sure drones have a place, but they can't replace bulk delivery.
Not necessarily. It would stand to reason if you were comparing identical routes, but we're not. Rolling around the boxes in bulk requires travelling in quite restricted ways, through often congested areas, and because it's in bulk needs to travel to every location on the route. So the final box has been carried far further than the distance it needed to.
How much more efficient could you make your route in a normal truck if you were able to remove, say, 5 boxes from your load. That's 5 locations you can take away from your overall plan. How many truck miles can you remove from your journey? How many drone miles must you add?
Well, it'd be multiple drones sure but "a huge swarm" is a bit of a stretch. 100 boxes might be 10 trips for 10 drones. At up to 50mph and a 20 mile round trip, they could get through quite a few trips.
Just because there's the talk of "within 30 minutes" doesn't mean everything has to be done in 30 minutes.
> (Some of which may drop that 1kg box on someone's head.)
And some of the trucks will hit a kid in the road. Unless we're talking actual numbers and rates, any of these things are pretty useless for comparing the two methods.
> Difficult to imagine a case for this delivery method other than pure instant gratification.
Efficiencies, possibly? What's the energy cost of bringing a big truck with lots of parcels vs lots of smaller deliveries with lighter drones?
How many people will travel into a city to buy an item currently sooner than it could be delivered? Could we cut out those trips? They're massively inefficient if you're driving, picking something up and just heading back.
A physical item I want to send to someone fairly close by requires me to take it to someone to put into a system which moves it from building to building, through a distribution centre, then onto a truck to drive to their house. Or (though I don't actually have a car) I need to drive it there myself. Couldn't a drone just pick it up and take it there? Or a series of drone transfers?
If anything this makes a strong case for a luxury tax on ultra-premium delivery services.
The amount of damage done to roads by vehicles scales as something like the fourth power of weight at the axles, so the repair cost of cycling is nil, anyway.
Everyone benefits from roads one way or the other, so the cost of roads and infrastructure should be spread. It's not an ethical issue, just a matter of who can afford to pay. Bill Gates profits greatly from his employees having infrastructure by which they can get to work, even if he doesn't drive. That's kind of the whole point of having a state.
That is my pricing model.
The truck will probably travel a smaller distance in total than all the drones would, but my guess is that the total impact of the truck driving around is larger that the total impact of the drones. In particular if they manage to make the drones less noisy.
The best is probably a hybrid system where a truck filled with drones charged with packages drives to the right part of the town and releases all the drones for the last kilometers of transport.
As for: "non-critical stuff" - is that really up to you decide for others what's critical for them or not? If they're willing to pay extra for drone delivery, it's critical enough for them.
Also - as far privacy goes: "The company also claims it's working on ways to make the machines quieter and it says they won't have cameras on, just sensors."
Well, nobody enters without ringing, and I receive them at the door.
And danger: I'll let you know as soon as parcels or drones start dropping and damaging property or injuring people.
> If they're willing to pay extra for drone delivery, it's critical enough for them.
Exactly, that's why you need the taxes, to price in societal costs.
And make some deliveries drone-tax-free (blood delivery)
http://www.nj.com/middlesex/index.ssf/2016/06/5-year-old_boy...
As for "pricing in the societal costs" - that's called paying insurance.
Not really, because there are costs which are not apparent, or are a matter of policy.
- What is the cost of annoying me with drones' noise? I hope the government decides it is non zero.
- I do not know about drones, but I know about a past blunder: what is the cost of operating a nuclear plant? Now it is clear that it must include the non-negligible costs of disposing of nuclear waste and dismantling the nuclear plant. The operators of nuclear plants have reaped the benefits and left society with the costs. I very much hope that we are not so naive this time, and society is able to properly evaluate all costs, and pass them to the operators.
All-included Prime Delivery with zero delivery costs (because drone costs will tend to zero, and anyway Amazon is happy to cover the costs because they save on other delivery methods), will have as a consequence an unbound amount of underpants flying over my head. So I need some externalities added by the government to balance the situation.
- Autonomous cars that act as a safe caravan (which enables higher speeds and, due to communication, instant responses which human drivers can't even match in theory - since a human driver cannot know that a car three cars ahead has just this millisecond started to break heavily, but software can transmit that. According to the DMV "the average driver's reaction time is .75 seconds ... or 1 car length for every 10 mph".)
- internet of things which let me be a master in my home with all my stuff being servants. please, tell me why I should with my own hands do stuff that devices could do by myself at my command. Tell me why it's better to be a servant than an king/queen.
if you do these I'll have more stuff for you to shit on. This is so amazing, it is really fun to watch. In the case of drones, for example, this is the coolest thing from the future anyone could possibly have imagined, it is something that a 60's comic book about the future would have shown about a future utopia.
i'd love to see how you shit on other stuff.
what could be cooler?
also could you shit on autonomous cars and also the Internet of Things, I'd like to see how you object to other cool stuff that means we're living in a utopian future that sci fi authors could only have dreamed about.
Your future is not Utopian, it is Dystopian: worsening the quality of living of most of the population, while those with resources legislate for themselves no-fly zones, and have their beautiful silent gardens.
While they are enjoying dinner in their perfectly tended gardens, they are cashing in by convincing you that you really want 30 minute delivery of products you do not even need. But what can you do? You are living in a shitty neighborhood full of shitty smell and noise, and those products are so cheap and cost nothing to deliver and anyway there are already 2999 drones flying around my head, why not relieve yourself a bit and buy the 3000th underpants, which anyway you need because you have already used the ones you have for three weeks?
The complete summary of rules is here:
I guess you'll have a 2-3 year secure-delivery-to-your-garden window.
Build a drone that tracks other drones going out of the Amazon warehouse, wait until parcel is dropped, and pick it up.
You could of course build a drone-police which shuts down all dark-drones. I hope the costs of such an infrastructure will be paid by taxes on drone delivery (or by increased price in drone delivery), and that society at large is not left covering the cost of such nonsense.
I imagine the packages dropped off at the backyard will be even more secure than that.
- is it worth it?
- will I get caught?
- am I a robber?
Stealing from the front of your house does not happen because most people are not robbers, and it is easy to get caught. Besides, you don't know what's inside, so you don't know if it's worth it.
A criminal operation with a dark-drone infrastructure is a different issue altogether:
- difficult to get caught, at least until we create structures to fight such operations
- it is organized by thieves - by definition
- it does not matter what you are stealing: once you have the dark-drones working, operating them is very cheap, so you can steal as much as you can, making the operations profitable.
I think that depends a great deal on where you live. Nice small town in the country where everyone knows each other, no problems, big city, no chance of it not being stolen.
In Italy the express couriers are not allowed to leave stuff in your front yard, and it's generally not possible to schedule the first delivery attempt.
I am 99.999999% certain Amazon intends for them to be completely autonomous.
They might be imagining the pilot being some form of "air controller" person.