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Comment by benjamincburns | Hacker News Reader

In all of the criticism, I haven't seen anything remarking on the energy cost for this. I can hear a strawman in the audience saying "But drones are tiny/electric/cheap!" Not at these scales. Consider the (lack of) efficiency of quadcopters, the weights and distances involved, and the total sales volume for this service in even a small test market. I'd buy that flight itself is a viable option over wheeled vehicles when you consider more direct transit, reduction in delays due to traffic, and the reduction in weight of the delivery vehicle, but I'd imagine this advantage would only exist for fixed-wing delivery vehicles, not quad/hex/octo-copters.

$20 says that if this ever happens in the real world, the delivery vehicles are mechanically very different from what's shown in the promo video.

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What I wonder is why nobody is pointing out that delivering less than 2kg in 30 min in a radius of 10 km can be done freely on a cheap pizza using plain old human labour.

I fail to imagine at what stage Amazon drone become cheaper considering the reliability of drone and the complexity of navigating a dense urban environment (I assume it is to be used there) Also, if it can be done cheaply enough, takeaways will eventually use the same system. I wonder how that will scale ...

While the pizza delivery will be cheap now but given time for the technology to mature and then the scale of the operation will make drone technology more cheaper. Obviously it will take a quite a time before it adds to profit line. As usual Amazon will keep absorbing the losses for that time and it is well equipped to that, if amazon history tells us anything.

Actually, the real cost comes from batteries. They're only good for a finite number of cycles, and under the high loads they'll experience in this sort of application, I would put that number at around 250-750 flights. So if you're spending $30-$50 a battery, that adds up pretty quickly. Electricity is really cheap in comparison.

I don't know if fixed-wings would help much with a box hanging beneath the drone. But i agree the final version will be a lot more aerodynamic and probably have a horizontal and vertical flight mode. Amazon does stuff for long term profitability. They will do it if they know that it will eventually become cost effective with time and scale. Plus they will rationalize not having any margins (or even negative margins) by increased customer happiness and loyalty.

> I don't know if fixed-wings would help much with a box hanging beneath the drone.

The only reason it was "hanging" in the Prime Air video was for PR fluff.

Fixed wing transport is still amazingly good at cargo carrying, using "holds" in their monocoques.

It costs $7 to charge a Model S base model with US average rate electricity ($0.12/kilowatt hour). The battery on these is much less than a kilowatt hour.

The battery and equipment are going to be much more expensive, but I believe they can probably get it to be cheaper than a human delivery person.

The energy cost would have to be less than shipping by traditional means, which requires much more human involvement, additional sorting, travel, and stops. If you've ever tracked a package this would be pretty obvious.

I, for one, eagerly await the return of the autogryo for local mail delivery.

A $1 surcharge gives them an awful lot of electricity to work with, so the efficiency using it might not matter a whole lot.

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