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Comment by enjo | Hacker News Reader

" and the main differentiator is a gimmick.

My bet is that drones will be able to service these deliveries MUCH more quickly than humans. They're not in traffic. They can scale up with demand much more easily (much of the wait for Door Dash et al. is just getting someone available to make the delivery). Those advantages even get more pronounced with distance (up to whatever serviceable distance drones will have).

I'm very bullish on the idea of drone delivery. I'm hopeful that it will empower smaller businesses to compete with Amazon prime even, but that's probably a pipe dream.

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They are not in road traffic, they will create air traffic. Airspace management is a thing. Since at least 2010 there's been research around drone integration within airspace infrastructure management and I am bullish on software/hardware to keep all that traffic straight. Also bullish on new areas for insurance products...

With the right software, you could have a separation between drones of only a few feet. That would equate to trillions of drones flying simultaneously over just the USA and below 200feet.

Why not just fly them over roads? The network is already there to reach any residence and it's less noisy than a car. A crash would probably not hurt anyone, and assuming the crash rate is insignificant, they would probably reduce the overall incidence of traffic accidents, considering the likely reduced number of cars (the delivery services that will be displaced).

A crash won’t hurt anyone? Did you see the size of that drone in the article? Having that land on top of your car or MC could very well cause significant damage, I should think.

No worse than crashing into another car, I would think.

I know very little about automotive engineering, but I would suspect that cars are built to withstand impacts on the X-Y axis, not the Z-axis.

They are designed to not crush you if they roll over and I'm pretty sure that drone doesn't weigh more than a car.

The main risk I can see are if it comes straight at your windshield or you're on a motorcycle.

A crash would definitely cause a lot of damage, these drones are huge and think about what's on the road.

How high? Do these roads cross established instrument departure and approach routes? How do you ensure separation?

Right now when you get an IFR clearance the ATC system ensures you have separation from other aircraft. This needs to be accounted for somehow.

Until they can make them so quiet I don't hear them I'm going to work hard on regulating them so they cannot bug the hell out of me and cause damage with they malfunction.

Have you heard of cars? They make noise and cause damages too.

Maybe oblib is also trying to regulate cars.

I was beat to that action before I was born and in fact, by that time auto makers were advertising that their cars were were quiet. Luxury cars like Cadillacs were so quiet you couldn't even hear them running when standing outside right next to them and even quieter inside.

Try cutting off the "mufflers" on your car and see how far you get before getting pulled over a gifted a citation for it.

I looked into cars from your comment and it seems working hard toward regulation is the right approach.

Many cities regulate maximum vehicle noise levels.

It only impacts individual vehicle’s maximum ability, not counting the horns and other sound warnings.

It’s still a hell of a noise when you have intermitent traffic mixed with ponctual congestion.

As a European, everytime I'm in NYC the sound of horns and sirens is a non-stop nuisance — I personally enjoy the feeling for a few days because I don't live there, but I sympathise with actual New Yorkers who put up with this all year long. It's almost as bad as the garbage situation there.

IMHO, you guys need to put laws+fines in place to prevent the abusive use of horns (people literally use it even when they have to stop at a red light behind someone else...), and mandate that sirens only be used in real emergency situations. Big cities are so much nicer with less aggresive noises. Not to mention your liking automatic and hybrid cars makes traffic overall very silent by default.

New York is something of an exceptional case. Not that other cities are quiet, but the busy areas of New York take horns, sirens, etc. to the next level. Even someone generally used to urban living will find the general noise and congestion level exceptional. (By US standards. There are obviously other world cities that are very noisy and crowded as well.)

You can do a lot to mitigate road noise by physically blocking it. That’s not so easy with air traffic.

I don't know about you, but I don't want cars flying over my backyard either.

and if history any guide, you have good chances of succeeding for a time :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts

"The most draconian restrictions and speed limits were imposed by the 1865 act (the "Red Flag Act"), which required all road locomotives, which included automobiles, to travel at a maximum of 4 mph (6.4 km/h) in the country and 2 mph (3.2 km/h) in the city, as well as requiring a man carrying a red flag to walk in front of road vehicles hauling multiple wagons.

...

In addition to any concerns about the state of the roads, by the 1860s, there was concern that the widespread use of traction engines, such as road locomotives and agricultural engines, would endanger the safety of the public. It was feared that engines and their trailers might cause fatal accidents, scare horses, block narrow lanes, and disturb the locals by operating at night. Although all of these fears were justified and were soon realized, there was a gradual acceptance of the machines as they became more common in commerce."

You don't miss your sunset til it's droned

I wonder if we’ll see independently-owned drones doing deliveries ala Amazon’s driver-partner contractors. I suppose it depends on how much drones cost in capital and how much liability there is to make it worth it for the big cos to distance themselves that way. Employment costs probably aren’t much of an issue.

Literally never. The FAA doesn’t mess around with this stuff. Do you think they’d trust your average Joe, who can’t even manage to keep the oil in his car changed every 10,000 miles, to maintain a 10+lb flying machine that could fall on a child or damage property? Conventional aircraft have strict maintenance and inspection intervals that require a decade of experience to work on.

Add to that that it contains lithium batteries so it can also catch fire in mid air and set property it falls on alight.

As opposed to petroleum?

You can build your own plane... in the usa it doesn't even have to be from a kit. They just have to pass engineering inspections and categories.

DoorDash service must vary on location. Where I live the biggest delay is not waiting for someone to accept the order but for the food to be made and for traffic on the way to your house. Usually I see dashers at restaurants waiting for food to be done.

> They can scale up with demand much more easily

Have you though about how many packages of the size and weight one of these drones can carry fit in the smallest delivery lorry? Judging from the video, I'd say one thousand is a good estimate. It means you need one thousand drone trips, both ways, to deliver what fits in a few square metres. How does this scale?

And then think of all those drones in pouring rain, or hail, or strong winds, or just at night in areas with vertical obstacles. It's just absurd.

They are not allowed to fly in the night and I guess they will avoid days with strong winds.

Are deliveries right now being fulfilled by drones flying to a location being loaded up and then flown to the destination? Or are the good being sent to a central location and then dispatched?

Who wakes up saying "gosh my life would be so much better if I could just buy things faster"?

Well, we’re talking about food delivery here. I’d order food much more often if it arrived quickly and thus was hotter when it got here.

And with no cares or worries that the noise would bug the hell out of your neighbors?

Come on... this is an awful idea.

Now would that be my neighbors who drive a dirtbike around their property for 6 hours a day, or the neighbors who tie their dog up outside at night and let it bark constantly at 2am?

Sounds like the broken windows theory in action.

Sounds racist man.

The dirtbike around their property neighbors.

Brick and mortar stores are going out of business left and right based on the market reality that people are more than willing to wait 2 days for their items if it's cheaper and is delivered to their door.

I think it's an extremely niche market, so I think it'll only be successful if you charge out the nose for the delivery.

They're going out of business because their inventory sucks. Every recession makes them suck more as MBAs optimize for lower quality and less selection.

You do not have kids, don't you?

I’d love to hear the connection explained.

I have kids, and this isn't a problem for me - not really sure what the children angle is here?

I live in a small rural town in Scotland, yet Amazon and others can deliver stuff to my door the next day. In big cities, some companies even offer same-day delivery.

Honestly, I don't need my stuff any quicker than that.

I'm sure there are some genuinely useful niche uses for drones - for example, there was a recent HN post about a company in Africa doing drone delivery of medical supplies to remote and inaccessible locations.

But I don't think it's a good idea to fill our skies with noisy, flying lithium batteries, just so you can get a pizza in 16 minutes instead of 18.

Do you own a blender? How often do you use it? Do you not think that the economic and environmental cost of producing that blender is too large, considering how rarely you use it? It literally sits unused 99.99% of the time. Talk about inefficiency!

If a drone service could deliver a blender in 5 minutes when you had blending to do, and take it away again when you're done, the blender could get much better utilisation by being shared with the entire town, at a lower economic and environmental cost.

The same probably applies to nearly everything in your house.

"Sharing economy but with drones" is a weird choice of hills to die on in 2019.

Good way of "disrupting" the blender/appliances market.

While you might have a point for some items, I think there are diminishing returns for most; I obviously don't have numbers, but it would seem to be highly inefficient to fly a blender around with a drone. Your 5-minute figure is also pretty unrealistic.

I could see how drone delivery might work for high value items, but they could just as easily be delivered in an EV van/truck carrying hundreds of items instead of just one. One genuinely useful case might be quickly flying blood/organs to a hospital.

There is also the human cost to consider; the noise of a single drone is very irritating, I can't imagine the horror of having our skies filled with the things.

I know of course you were generalising, but in my particular case, I actually do use my mini-blender quite often (for making curry pastes) :)

While cool in theory, I can't imagine the noise pollution and airspace traffic that would be generated by these drones.

It's the people who wake up saying "gosh my life would be so much better if I could just sell things faster", they're not really looking to improve your life, just the bottom line.

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