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Your Next Online Order Could Be Delivered To Your Car's Trunk
cartechboy writes "It's amazing how far we've come with technology. Now many of us have the ability to work remotely, and we can even lock/unlock our vehicles via the Internet. And yet, the way we receive our packages from FedEx, UPS, and USPS hasn't really changed. But Volvo thinks it has a way to revolutionize package delivery with Roam Delivery: instead of having packages delivered to your house or office, you could have packages dropped off in the trunk of your car. Volvo says this would work via its new digital keys technology which would allow customers to choose their car as a delivery option when ordering goods online. Via a smartphone or tablet, the owner would be informed when a delivery requires dropping off or picking up from the car. Accepting the delivery will enable a digital key which tracks when the car is opened, and then when it's locked again. The digital key expires once the delivery is complete. Not only does this sound pretty slick, but the technology to make it happen is pretty simple. Now the only question is whether you really want your Amazon box being delivered to your vehicle."
You end up with a nice large expensive thing sitting on top of your car until you get there to deal with it.
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In Soviet Russia, someone could order you to be delivered in the trunk of a car.
UPS/FedEx/USPS have efficient routing because your house doesn't move. They can plan the best way to get from the warehouse/depot to a set of locations throughout the day. I think this is akin to the traveling salesman problem...
Now, if you have it delivered to your car, which is mobile, how are they supposed to coordinate this? If the truck leaves the depot at 7am, and my car is detected at my house, the truck has a route optimized for delivery to my house. If I go to the grocery store at 9am, does the truck re-reroute to the grocery store and then if I go to the bank 30min later re-route again?
Doubt it.
This might work if you tell them that your car will be in a fixed location throughout the day. But I'm not sure that civilian GPS is sensitive enough to tell the driver where your car is when it's in a parking lot with 500 other cars.
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Never been known to fail..."
This seems like a good idea at first, but I don't think it'll fit well within the current delivery system. Packages tend to make it to your local (town) sorting facility the day before you get them... so you'll have to know where your car will be at least a day before your package get's delivered? Cars have a bad habit of moving between towns, would your package be routed to a new sorting facility or would the delivery truck try to chase you down?
This seems like a solution in search of a problem.
If my car is at home, the package can be delivered to my home. If my car is at work, the package can be delivered to my work. And if my employer objects, I imagine they would also object to packages being delivered to the trunk of my on-premises vehicle.
And actually, most of the time when I'm at work, my car is parked near where I catch the train. But I'm sure no one with a crowbar would EVER consider keeping an eye on places where many unattended cars are left every day...
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got in the trunk of my car. Amazon must have put them their by mistake!
While this sounds like a fantastic idea in theory, has anyone thought about the privacy and security problems with someone knowing the location of your car and tracking your whereabouts? Suppose that these were not issues, how would the logistics work about routes? UPS and FedEx devote enormous amounts of computing power to figure out the optimal route. How is that going to work with moving delivery locations?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
How about a big NO.
Dispose of hooker's body before UPS drops off wife's birthday gift.
Have gnu, will travel.
If my car is home, I might as well have it delivered to my house. I work where you need an ID to get into the parking lot, so that's out. I'm usually not anywhere else long enough to get packages (has mental image of a delivery vehicle chasing my car down the highway).
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I probably just haven't heard of this idea before. But there are very few ideas that are this innovative. Yes, I'll have to commit to having my car in the parking lot at 101 North Main Street from 9 to 5 on a particular day, but it's there every weekday anyhow. And why just UPS/etc? I can give one-time keys to anyone I choose. The Feds will hate this because a mobile lockbox will be so much harder to investigate, right up to the day when they learn how to crack it (or are given a back door). Then they'll love it. However, it'll make framing people a lot easier, too. I suspect there'll be a lookup table specifying, by car model, how large a parcel one can receive.
So I can have Gone in Sixty Seconds delivered to my car and have them both stolen before I get off work!
Howzabout having your driver-less car queue up at a curb-side delivery area, outside of a distribution point?
Then, the car's trunk gets opened remotely, or there is a single-use code to open it?
If only there were some sort of box in front of my house, maybe with a lock on it, that a delivery could be made to... oh, wait. How about we just work on inter-company cooperation between the USPS and UPS/Fedex/Etc?
What if they have a trunk monkey!?
Having this makes some sense... as long as it's standard in cars.
Some people might not like putting junk in their trunk.
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After reading TFA, I wondered why this hadn't already been done on a large scale. After all, for the most part, the hardware is already in place. It's just a software/process problem. But then I read a few of the comments here, and realized that it hadn't already been done because many lack the imagination to see how well this is going to work. "Just have it delivered to your house"??? So it's either stolen or sits outside in the rain all day. Nice. "Just have it delivered to your office"??? Are you sure it comes in a plain brown wrapper? The only serious downside I read was that cars in unattended areas might be subject to break-in after deliveries are observed. Which brings me to the other piece of hardware I'd want—a camera in the trunk, or even the back window, that records events leading up to the trunk being opened and closed and immediately saves those in a hardened place or sends them somewhere else. Also, the camera may make it unnecessary to empty the trunk ahead of time, as the UPS man would be recorded not stealing the stuff that was already in there because he's either honest or knows he'll be watched.
I do think that for the most part, deliverers will have to know the car's delivery-day (or pickup-day) general location at least a day ahead of delivery-day (pickup-day) so as to optimize their travel.
If I'm the deliverer, I want the trunk to pop open completely before I'm standing in front of it to avoid nasty surprises left for me.
If all else fails, use the trunk monkey.
What will this lead to? Commonly used outdoor-access closets/boxes with Internet-connected electronic locks for parcel delivery/pickup at home. I'm already planning to add one. I'm pretty sure they already exist, but I've yet to see one.
Obviously, there's no way to limit who would be eligible to be able 'deliver to your trunk'.
This would be a easy way to make purchases of illicit materials without having to meet face-to-face. But would you trust someone else with access to your car's trunk?
On the flip-side, perhaps this could turn into a mobile version of geo-caching...
So the mob owns Volvo now. Who knew?
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Excelent idea, but not everyone will benefit. There is a large number of people who work in the offices and campuses and their vehicles are in very predictable locations. UPS/Fedex trucks come to the offices during the day anyway. UPS/Fedex can very efficiently, very fast drop the packages to the trunks of the cars. Awesome idea. The negative side of idea is further loss of privacy.
UPS/FedEx have efficient routing because of hand-tuned algorithms. Whether it's your car or your house doesn't matter, they can reschedule your package to be delivered to your house, your work or any other location in a matter of minutes. Your car's location would just be on their grid and scheduled accordingly - it would require them to know your car's location whether that is at your house, your job or at your mistress' house.
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I'm pretty sure the process of getting that digital key identifies you, or at least identifies the owner of the car. This isn't a way to anonymously get deliveries.
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When can I get this option for a mail order bride?
The whole point of locking my car, and my trunk, is to prevent access to it. I have zero interest is some skeezy delivery man opening my trunk. Forget about my sensitive business documents, and my expensive roadside safety equipment, what I really don't want the delivery guy to see is the package from the previous delivery guy.
Quite frankly, I'd prefer to give him a key to my house -- at least then he doesn't need to re-organize my stuff to make room.
Of course, it'd be a lot easier to give him the key to the tool shed in my backyard.
But easier than all of that is what I do right now -- leave it with the neighbour.
And finally, the best option of all, just leave it at the front door. It's a safe neighbourhood. If it weren't, I wouldn't have chosen to spend hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep all of my stuff there.
they protect my credit card info?
many parking lots in north San Jose and Milpitas have signs saying not to leave valuables in your car. Mainly because the alarming number of work laptops that are stolen during lunch.
Imagine having a full-size fridge delivered to the trunk of a Mini. ...or having something delivered to your off-road vehicle which is parked in in some crazily inaccessible location. ...or scheduling something to be urgently delivered to you the same day you're driving across the US. How far would the truck really follow you?
I found an exploit and it only took me 3 seconds. Someone orders you a package, pretends to be you the second it gets delivered, leaves the trunk open, steals the package and the car by climbing in.
I can see this being useful for people who get to work at 9AM and stay at work all day until 6PM.
"My car will be at [business address] between the hours of 9AM and 6PM. It is a [color] [year] [make] [model] with tags [tag number]."
Is this better than having a parcel dropbox at home? No.
Is this better than having them leave it with the leasing office? No.
Is this better than having them ship it to you at work? No.
But not everyone has those things.
I bike to work!
... if you park your car in the FedEx/UPS/USPS parking lot.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
UPS deliveries to a car sound like a niche market for traveling consultants, lawyers, etc. who might discover they need some smallish thing while on-site.
But pizza and beer deliveries to the party on the beach (or in the park) sound like a much bigger market. Flying a drone-load of beer to ice-fishermen slowly floating out into the middle of one of the Great Lakes after the thaw hits would help make the wait for rescue by the Coast Guard much easier.
UPS/FedEx have efficient routing because of hand-tuned algorithms. Whether it's your car or your house doesn't matter, they can reschedule your package to be delivered to your house, your work or any other location in a matter of minutes.
FedEx can't figure out the right place to deliver a package if you tell them in person where it is supposed to go. I shipped myself some loot from Christmas back home instead of carrying it on the plane and they changed the address. I only wrote it on the shipping documents in plain English and they still got it wrong.
It's not like they don't have multiple FedEx deliveries to this location every work day of the week so they already know we're here or anything. And as good as that sentence looks, it means THEY ALREADY DELIVER HERE EVERY DAY, WHY DON'T THEY KNOW WE ARE HERE?
In summer months almost anywhere, and even fall/spring in warm areas (read: half the USA), this would put your goods in very uncomfortable temperatures, even for non-perishables (ever had plastic melt while it's in the car trunk?)
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I work in an area that has a high number of large companies with big parking lots. Nearby there's plenty of places to eat, and all employers warn their employees never to leave laptops in their car, in sight, when they go to lunch. As it's a common occurrence for people to walk the restaurant parking lots and "smash n grab" a laptop bag.
So now you're providing the opportunity for someone to sit in a parking lot, wait for a UPS/FedEx truck to drive around, identify a vehicle, deliver a package and drive away. Then the thief would go up to the car, and pry open the trunk and in 2minutes drive off with the package.
I'm also surprised that Volvo would suggest this since they sell quite a few cars that do not have sealed trunks but are open in the back like a station wagon/SUV/crossover.
Who says that no-questions, no-touch freight has to come from a major carrier?
Then again, this is Volvo, not BMW.
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Volvo plans to sell businesses the right to open your trunk.
Seriously? For the case where you're not going home the day it's delivered, yet you need the package to take wherever you are going instead?