Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggreer | Hacker News Reader

A truck travels a greater distance to deliver those 500 packages to the same locations, as it must take roads instead of flying in a straight line. And roads are much more likely to have people on them than a random patch of ground. Also the truck weighs several tons. The weight requires more energy to move stuff around, and has more kinetic energy than an 80lb drone.

View on HN

You should really consider how much energy it takes to levitate an 80lb drone while flying across town, compared to how much energy it takes to roll an 8000lb van across town (even ignoring the fact that the van might deliver 100 packages while making it's way across town).

An 8,000lb van will be using fossil fuels and emit particulates from tire and brake dust. Unless it was incredibly efficient and electricity for the drones was coming from coal plants, the van would emit more pollution.

But the biggest harm is people getting hit by vehicles. Delivery drones are much smaller and don't spend nearly as much time near people. Since drones can deliver stuff more quickly than large vans, they also substitute for individuals driving to a store to pick something up. So the total risk to pedestrians is even less than you might expect from eliminating many van deliveries.

I'm not so sure that the numbers will bear out what you sketch here. If we assume a drone flight per package and we scale this up to get rid of all of the delivery vehicles the number of people hit by and killed by drones will rise substantially. Drones are immature tech at best and a 5 Kg drone will put you in the morgue on impact with a greater likelihood than an accident with a delivery van. Gravity has no brakes and a drone isn't going to be able to refuse its imperative when the tech inevitably fails. I think you have to watch out not to be so 'anti' one thing that you end up with another that is as bad or even worse. Maybe the solution isn't drones and not delivery vans either.

You raise an interesting point about energy per delivery. In you example, which one is lower per package? I assume the electric truck.

Considering the distance from one delivery to the next in a van is short, and the warehouse to town distance is split via a hundred packages, it just has to be the electric van. Maybe things will make more sense if the drone can carry 20 lightweight packages. But even then you gotta wonder how much energy it takes to hover/fight gravity the entirety of the trip.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com