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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

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.

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