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Comment by mirzap | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of Uber, Lift, and food delivery companies... Years and decades of VC money poured in, and they still can't get profitable. How the fuck anyone can think using drones, with current technology, can be profitable in consumer-centric logistics?

Drone logistics has its unique value proposition, primarily for medical transfers and emergency deliveries in remote areas. But thinking that flying drones from city to city, or inside the city, will replace or offset road logistics to deliver someone a book in 50 minutes is just stupid.

Does anyone here think Zipline will justify its crazy multi-billion valuation?

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Things like books are generally in the 'free delivery' part of the delivery market, where your parcel arrives in a day or two on the back of a truck, and one truck does hundreds of deliveries before returning to the depot to reload. IMHO drones are very unlikely to replace trucks in that portion of the market.

But there are also people paying ~$10 per delivery for someone to bring them fast food. Where the driver goes directly from the restaurant to the customer, only carrying a single delivery. They might not need to carry more than 2kg.

Of course that depends on it being safe, reliable, legal, having nontrivial range with its full payload, and not damaging the product.

The cost of food delivery is dirt cheap, though, in most places it’s under $5. The reason it’s so cheap is because it leverages existing infrastructure and there’s an unlimited supply of people willing to deliver for below minimum wage. I can place an order for food and have it arrive within 15 minutes because there’s hundreds of delivery drivers just sitting around waiting in any major city, and that system is very flexible, we can have thousands more drivers on the road in minutes if demand surges.

For drone delivery to compete with this on cost, it would need to have tens of thousands of drones available in any city. How much does a drone and the infrastructure to operate it cost?

Drones benefit from being better over longer distances in cities but otherwise, it’s hard to imagine how they can compete (on price) with a system that is already extremely efficient (at the expense of the people participating in it).

> The cost of food delivery is dirt cheap, though, in most places it’s under $5.

I'm 0.6 miles from Starbucks and right now, a coffee that costs $2.78 in store costs $12.22 if I get it delivered.

Of course rather than listing it as a $9.44 delivery fee they just add a few bucks to the price of each item, plus a few bucks small order fee, plus a few bucks service fee, plus a few bucks delivery fee. So I can see why customers might perceive it as costing less than $5.

And you probably should tip too.

> How the fuck anyone can think using drones, with current technology, can be profitable in consumer-centric logistics?

Thing is, many societies are heading for demographic collapse or are already neck-deep in it (Japan). Even if it may be unprofitable now, we (as a society) need to invest serious amounts of money into automating a lot of unskilled labor, because otherwise we will run into disaster.

to be fair, automating all unskilled labor jobs is likely to be a different sort of disaster, specifically for people unable to perform skilled labor.

We've been automating away labor for 250 years now.

It's clearly the best thing that's ever happened in human history, so far.

In the long run, yes. Short term consequences can be devastating so.

The "we've been automating since the industrial revolution and jobs have adapted" argument doesn't really account for scale. If I skin my knee (~1% of my skin) once a month for five years, that's hardly an issue. I might even form callouses. If I lose 60% of my skin to injury at once, that's a far bigger situation.

Are you implying that AI will replace 60% of jobs in the time that "regular" progress replaces 1% of jobs?

I agree that that would be a big disruption, and it would take some time to adapt to a 150% increase in productivity.

Some temporary measures to make the adjustment might be needed.

But it would in the end be one of the best things that ever happened to humanity!

If you're rich, that is. Meanwhile, unskilled labor can't pay their rent or buy food.

You're thinking about automation, not drone deliveries.

Where those aspects intersect is that it seems easier to build an autonomous flying vehicle than an autonomous road-going vehicle. Of course, drones have their own downsides for deliveries, including cost because of small payload.

> Where those aspects intersect is that it seems easier to build an autonomous flying vehicle than an autonomous road-going vehicle.

Someone needs to carry the parcel from the road vehicle, in contrast to a drone that flies up to the customer's window, fire exit or whatever.

> Someone needs to carry the parcel from the road vehicle

Nope ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssrk9bW2xBk

Drones are quite similar, actually: unless they can safely drop into your garden they'll need some sort of secure storage for you to get your parcel from. They are a number of companies working on this: Basically drone lands on top of a locker station and dumps its cargo into it, then you collect your package with a QR code or similar. Even if drones deliver on the roof of residential buildings I think something like that is needed to keep things safe and orderly.

Japan's reproductive stats are not uniquely bad, they just don't accept the same level of immigration as other developed countries.

It's about labour. Replacing the salary of a human physically delivering a package will cover any overhead two times over.

You don't seembto grasp the reality of delibery drivers salaries. Teamsters are the exception, and even they are competively cheap per parcel delivered, otherwise UPS would never have agreed.

2-3 grant for a month of delivering parcels. How many parcels. 500? 1000? Thats 2 to 6 dollars per parcel. Goodluck bringing your costs down to that level with drones.

I would definitely use the service if it was offered and pay extra to have things delivered. For example say my car breaks down, I am reading codes off the car and it says I need a part. Call parts store and they have it, have it sent over while I finally get a chance to eat some lunch or something. Also I wouldn't have to find a ride to go get said part.

Middle of cooking dinner and realize you are out of a couple ingredients and they can offer half hour delivery, sometimes it takes 45 minutes in the last city I lived in to get to Walmart. This service would be appealing.

This is going to appeal to those who are ultra busy and are willing to spend a little extra to get something delivered promptly without leaving their home.

Uber, Lyft and other delivery companies require a human to be making the delivery. That's the whole point about why this has potential to be more economically sound.

So you think drones that require recharge (battery replacement) every 40-60 minutes and carry 1.8 to 2kg of cargo will replace a human? I don't think so.

I believe in autonomous drone delivery, which will probably be a reality one day. But the prerequisite for that is enormous advancement in battery technology. Nothing else matters if you can't fly a day or two without recharging.

Why does that matter once there are enough charging stations and you have enough drones? Once you have enough battery life to do any single delivery and return to a charger, that’s all you need, everything else is just a bonus.

> every 40-60 minutes and carry 1.8 to 2kg of cargo will replace a human

Yes, and I've seen it work for the already existing road drones. You still need a human to be there swapping batteries but that one human can do the delivery work of probably 50 people based on how fast each swap was. When I toured they weren't at the scale where they were continuously replacing batteries so it was only about 10x at the time.

The economics that will make or break it is the lifetime cost of the drone, but it absolutely can replace humans.

Given what they have been doing in Rwanda with blood delivery, yeah, I do think they have something going here. The tech is 'mostly' proven to me. The question is one of scale and usage.

> The question is one of scale and usage

So in other words the hard part.

> with current technology

They’re literally building new technology

There is nothing new there from a technology aspect. What part of the drone didn't exist 20 years ago? Or 50? But I primarily meant on battery technology anyway. Until you have entirely new battery technology that will be compact, ultralight, safe, and long-lasting (at least a day or two of flight without recharge), drone deliveries will not be profitable.

It will serve the niche market, though. But that's not a multibillion-dollar market with a bunch of competitors.

Let's see:

- silent propeller

- advanced computer vision

- miniaturised compute power

- precise civilian positioning systems

- batteries with good-enough densities

Of those, batteries are indeed the biggest blocker but let's not pretend there hasn't been any progress in the past 20 years.

Why do they need to last a day or two without recharge? Just have charging hubs that swap out the batteries for fresh ones, and now it's an optimization problem

>This reminds me of Uber, Lift, and food delivery companies... Years and decades of VC money poured in, and they still can't get profitable.

I think it was Uber, I remember reading that one of them would be profitable if they shut down their R&D department and focused on just ride sharing.

I don't know about justifying their multi-billion dollar valuation but the killer application of this in my mind is for pharmacies. There are a lot of pharmacies offering same day delivery now for both prescription and over the counter drugs, and a lot of people that need drugs that can't otherwise go out and get them on their own. My in-laws get their drugs delivered this way sometimes and it's almost always a driver in their personal car that drops off the delivery. I'm guessing the drivers are only dropping off a few prescriptions per trip, so it's likely not very efficient.

The supply chain proposition in the video is very enchanting, at least for Africa, where it can cut down transport times from days to hours

  multi-billion valuation

in which market?

Uber and Instacart are both currently profitable.

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