Why did We Hear 5 Years Ago That Online Orders Would Be Delivered By Drone, And This Is Nowhere Near Happening Yet?
In: Economics
Amazon and WalMart are both doing drone deliveries in Arizona this year. Apparently, it’s too hot for the drones during the summer, but they should be starting up once things cool down.
There was also an Amazon drone trial in California. So it might not be happening where you live, but it is happening.
Some are, but there’s still a high cost to doing so.
Think about it this way, the USA has a large amount of paved roads. This makes it easy and cheap to deliver items, possibly even thousands if the vehicle is large enough.
However, not ALL of the US is paved. How do you deliver to someone if they don’t have roads near them?
Drones. The problem here is that drones are expensive and you can’t take nearly as many orders.
You can send thousands of packages by a semi truck, maybe 1 or two by drone. That doesn’t include that normal methods of delivery are tried and true through legal issues and temperature issues. Staffing may be a problem as well
Tldr; the cost vs reward is entirely too high.
my best guess would be it’s just not feasible. getting the licensing/air space authority, revamping the infrastructure of the delivery centers, getting drones that are capable of delivering oddly shaped or heavy packages, making sure the deliveries go to the right place, or having the drones get to where they need to go at all (how would it work manually? or even automated?).
the time and cost of getting all of this to happen would be insane, if possible at all right now. it’s not as easy as just buying a drone and strapping a box to it.
my guess is, we won’t see it for another 5 years probably at minimum. if nothing else, almost certainly because of the licensing and approval needed to do so. especially in the United States where the government moves at a snails pace on a good day.
It turns out, dreams are hard to realise and the future is hard to predict.
Nuclear fusion is predicted to be the future power source since the 70’s. Some say it will happen in the next 5 years, I will be suprised if it is.
Flying cars the same, it turns out to be more difficult, expensive and impratical than first thought.
Colonizing Moon / Mars, same story. Everytime people say it is going to happen, nothing happend.
So drones that deliver stuff, belongs right on this list. The people that write this stuff and spread the ideas usually do not do the engineering part 🙂
The focus on drone delivery was one of those business trends. Just like how companies were all about the cloud for some time, and now are going crazy over ai.
It probably will happen to a degree for locations that are hard to reach by road, at some point.
Drones have more problems than initially thought of. They’re good in some environments, for light packages, but otherwise it’s a nightmare.
They have low range, they get atacked by birds of prey, one bad gust of wind can send them flying into your walls or windows when they eventually land. They’re expensive to maintain, have short operative life, and can get expensive to replace. They make an annoying noise for everyone around. They also can’t lift heavy packages, nor anything with a shape that’ll catch in the wind.
Then, you have to think about scaling up. If one drone creates noise polution, what happens when there’s as many drones as there are birds out there? In urban environment, you start getting enough of them that collisions are a constant fact of life. A collision means damaging the product being delivered and the drone at best, or getting both stolen at worst. Actually, them crashing into cars can be the whole “at worst”, while we’re there. In suburban sprawl, they break the peace and quiet everyone paid a premium to enjoy on the regular.
People are afraid of drones and people will steal drones and packages.
So it’s not cost-effective and there’s not a lot of Goodwill behind it.
Turns out it’s cheaper to hire some guy on an e-bike to deliver stuff if you call him an independent contractor to avoid paying fair wages.
Similar to flying cars the heavier something is the more energy it takes to keep it in the air and the more energy it delivers if it happens to fall, drone delivery will only ever be available for light weight packages, limiting the service right from the start.
Replace “drone” with nearly any new technology and your statement could probably still be true. Look up the Gartner Hype Cycle
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