Wing and Walmart are bringing drone delivery to 100 new stores | Hacker News Reader

Wing and Walmart are bringing drone delivery to 100 new stores

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16 pointsgmays20 comments

How does drone delivery make any financial sense at all? It seems riskier nad less likely to work, given that people's homes (not to mention apartments) may not have any reasonable or safe delivery spots.

I would imagine that this makes sense for a large subset of deliveries, if 30-50% of deliveries can be done with drones, not only will it still be worth it, but I imagine those customers will likely buy more from the store, especially if they can make it same-day delivery

I'm not so sure drone-to-drone anti-collision detection is a solved science. Maybe it is as simple has 802.11p or v2x announcements to determine hight and traveling plane.

It may not make financial sense right now but these companies are willing to subsidize it on the expectation that it will one day make sense.

Someone needs to do the R&D work first and then roll out real world implementations to iron out the bugs.

Delivery is so much faster when you can fly point to point and don't have to contend with any traffic or traffic control (stop light, stop signs, etc.).

It's more of a surprise that delivering a hamburger in a ton of metal and plastic with a human driver makes financial sense.

I like proposed drone in the delivery truck ceiling idea. Adding even 20 deliveries a route would pay dividends pretty quickly. I'm concerned about the risk that I might end up with a Walmart/Amazon flight corridor over my house. Last-half-mile deliveries from vans would have a much lower impact.

Ukraine cargo container style. Do 40 deliveries at once in an area.

The same vehicle could also disgorge wheeled bots to drop off (or pick up) heavier stuff. The vehicle could rumble slowly (and quietly) thru a neighborhood while the sub-vehicles and drones do their thing, so it could be unmanned.

Why hasn't this taken 90% of the postal and delivery market?

Why aren't USPS/Amazon selling all their trucks and replacing them with drones?

I still want to know why we aren't heavily taxing junk mail instead of subsidizing. Or adding a national opt-out system. I do see the incentive problem for political junk mail, asking incumbents to vote against subsidizing that would be hard.

Junk mail is not subsidized per se. It does often cost less than non-marketing mail, but this is because it can take advantage of some discounts that lower volume senders have a harder time qualifying for.

In particular, you can get discounts for pre-sorting and bundling your mailings, formatting things in a way that is easier for USPS to automate, and for high volume.

i for one dont want some noisy ass mosquito camera recording pos flying around me that frequently. noise and light pollution are frustrating; though i can see where populated areas are already trained where that pollution is normal, adding a bit more is tolerable (edit: not that i want to be subject to that)

i would also be okay with the peoples jobs being replaced by the robots offered early retirement, paid fully by these big corps.. but of course that means the big corps would charge the rest of us more money over the longrun so that cost would not hurt their bottom line

Delivery trucks are louder than drones.

but they are not directly over my house, they go on the allocated roads on a schedule... but taking it to the gig-services, yes they could be more frequent and louder. the thing with sounds pollution is i dont hear the street-traffic on one side of my house. if its overhead theres no escape (edit: coupled, like i said, with all the information gathering those drones will be equipped with)

If you live in a typical suburban house a delivery truck might be a couple dozen feet away whereas a delivery drone is going to be a couple hundred feet above you.

ICE-powered trucks are louder than drones able to carry small packages. But carrying heavy packages will require extremely large and loud drones. All drones though are louder than EV trucks.

A delivery truck carries many packages, and delivers them along a route. A drone carries one package. In my neighborhood, that could be a drone every few minutes flying overhead.

Electric delivery trucks are also much quieter than a drone.

And, as another commenter suggested, heavy packages will still be done by truck. So we’ll have trucks AND drones.

>> Electric delivery trucks are also much quieter than a drone

The typical delivery truck here has rap music playing so loud you can hear it two blocks away, no exaggeration. Drones could possibly maybe not do that?

no they're not. Having been subject to Wing drones they are horrible.

A car or truck might be a bit noisy but it's low frequency and typically will drive by once maybe twice a day, and you probably can't hear it more than half a block from your house and only on the road side. if it's delivering next door the truck is making no noise during delivery.

The drones are like giant mosquitoes with direct line of site to all sides of your house. They can be heard from half a mile away and they can deliver constantly. if it's delivering next door it will also deliver it's annoying noise the entire time it's hovering nearby.

At one point I was doing some gardening and had 6 flyovers in 30 minutes directly over my head. 3 out 3 back. extremely invasive, extremely noisy, extremely annoying. And unlike a truck there's really no limit to how many drones you could experience in a day.

Drone delivery is a blight.

These are all in the southern US. Is that because of weather or other factors?

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