Hacker News Reader

Comment by drpgq | Hacker News Reader

Well at least drones will be an improvement. I hope.

This is the lofty dream castle that Amazon successfully dangles in front of the public in order to distract from what's going on with the people who actually do the deliveries. "Yeah, these poor guys, but...hey look, soon we will be delivering everything by drones. DRONES! Isn't that cool?!"

Everyone with basic knowledge in physics knows that this won't work except for a very small slice of the last-mile delivery use case (light packages below a certain, very limited size), and even in that small slice it won't be cost-competitive given any currently known technology. Oh, and don't even start to think about the safety problems in densely populated areas.

But hey, DRONES!!!

Not to mention the last-foot problem of placing the package somewhere safe for the recipient. How would these drones put a package in a locked vestibule or even my covered porch?

Drones from the truck to the door would work, however. I could see the elimination of the driver walking the package to more of a drone operator to dump the package on the doorstep. Automation could queue it up so they could just put it in park and fly it... or even have remote operators picking up the package from a truck to the doorstep.

Even if that was technically possible, it sounds like just putting these last few meters into the hands of the driver who's in the car anyway (yeah, I know, level 5 self-driving tech will solve that problem in 2020 as well - another one of those dream castles in the sky...) would be waaay cheaper.

And more flexible: not everyone lives in a standard American suburb home with a garden, a veranda and doorsteps in front of it. Lots of people live in multi-tenant houses without gardens, even without doorsteps - or if there are doorsteps, they end directly on the street, so anything left there is stolen within minutes. Hypothetical drones would have to ring the bell, fly through the staircase (without chopping off anyone's head in the process), find the right flat, maybe ring again, leave the package and find back to the car.

This task gets fully automated as soon as someone is able to produce an affordable and reliable human-like robot (in terms of extremities) and outfits it with an actually working AGI. Before that happens, it's cheap labor exploitation galore, and if the government should intervene in that reckless exploitation, maybe coupled with people shifting some of their deliveries away from their doorsteps and to delivery to pick-up stations (because of incentives like that being the only free delivery option, or being the fastest one).

Things that fly, almost by definition, are inherently less energy efficient than things that roll on the ground.

That's true but they can take (nearly) straight paths to their destination without stopping and idling, and are smaller and lighter.

Smaller and lighter, yes, but with drastically less carrying capacity. Your delivery van can pack over a hundred packages on a trip. Your delivery drone will probably carry one or two. So it's going to make a hundred more trips to replicate the same workload. Van might stop twenty times on the same block, drone has to return to the warehouse between each dropoff.

And engine idling is not a huge deal compared to the amount of thrust that must be expended constantly to keep a drone in the air (along with it's payload).

You'll gain a little on pathing straighter and then lose everything on upward thrust and repeat trips.

Bear in mind, the most efficient way to freight things: Trains. Trains are bigger and heavier, but they are the most efficient at moving things from one place to another.

The benefit you get from a drone potentially is package delivery in the time it takes to order a pizza, because it's automated direct shipping of one item at a time. But drones do not, in any way, offer the promise of fuel efficiency.

> Bear in mind, the most efficient way to freight things: Trains.

I think you just described the potential usefulness of drones in terms of energy used for a delivery. A drone only has to carry itself and it's package - compared to a car that has to carry it's weight, the driver's weight, the packages in the vehicle, etc.

I think it boils down to this: How many/weight of items being delivered to energy efficiency is on a curve. Sure trains are the most efficient method of transporting goods, but there's a reason a train doesn't deliver our packages to our doors. Building such an infrastructure would be insane.

That's why current delivery is tiered to the quantity/weight of the goods you're shipping.

I have a feeling drones will be more efficient for small packages, but larger ones will still be best by car.

A drone only has to carry itself and it's package, but it has to carry it in a vertical direction, and maintain that (because things in the air without thrust tend to fall back down to the ground, and that's bad). Meanwhile, a car only has to push itself in a horizontal direction around the ground.

As you say, the problem with trains isn't efficiency, it's infrastructure for last mile to our doors. However, we already have that for vans: Roads and driveways to our door are already built.

If I need a cell phone delivered to my front door, which is going to be more efficient: The van that already is delivering a larger box two doors down dropping it off, or a separate trip from the warehouse to my house from effectively, a small aircraft?

They're less likely to run over pedestrians.

I'm not willing to bet that the occasional Amazon Prime Air drone won't malfunction and crush a pedestrian or five.

> and crush a pedestrian or five.

I was going to make a sarcastic comment about my 1 sq ft amazon box carrying my pair of 2 AA batteries crushing someone, but I see that heavy lifter drones can carry up to 500 lbs. I have no idea why someone is next day ordering a large fridge from amazon, but a drone could both carry it and easily kill someone with it.

>> a drone could both carry it and easily kill someone with it

Now imagine some terrorist hacking Amazon network and doing that deliberately. I can even imagine a not-so-US-friendly country, like Russia, or North Korea doing that.

"Where were you when it rained fridges?"

Things that fly don't need to park blocking a lane of traffic.

Personally I'd like to see a truck that drives around the neighborhood like a little drone-aircraft-carrier, launching drones with packages for a short flight so that the truck doesn't have to stop. I don't think the technical challenges of that are any more complex than simple drone delivery.

Where are these drones going to land? That's a whole 'nother field of problems. Sure, driveways in suburban and rural areas, but what about in cities? Do we need helicopter pads on buildings for Amazon deliveries?

If there's one thing drone delivery is not, it's "simple". All of the work we did taming and mapping roadways and navigation has to be re-implemented for aerial flight. Every address needs to be mapped to a correct "spot" for a drone to offload it's package. Drones from competing companies need to figure out how to not collide with each other.

I too look forward to outside sounding like a swarm of angry bees 24/7.

What we need are autonomous trucks. Everyone’s delivery gets loaded onto a small locker truck that parks in central locations. Come get your orders!

I’d much rather drive/walk a few miles once a week than hear a fleet of drones at all hours of the day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com