Alibaba Tests Drone Delivery Service In China

An anonymous reader writes: Following the lead of online retail giant Amazon, Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba has today tested its first drone delivery service. Asia's largest e-retailer promises to deliver ginger tea within an hour to customers across its flagship consumer-to-consumer marketplace Taobao, which holds an estimated 90 per cent market share in the country. The remote-controlled black and silver drones are helicopter-like in design and carry a white box containing the product. For now the service is limited to a three-day test in three of China's largest mega-cities, Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, and confined to just one tea brand from one merchant. The trial will be applied up to a limit of 450 tea deliveries.

Comments

Wasteful, Inefficient, Potentially Dangerous...

[Akratist]

...but, also kind of cool in so many ways.

Re:Wasteful, Inefficient, Potentially Dangerous...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but, also kind of cool in so many ways.

I guess I don't understand using this technology for delivering local items. Maybe their just in a shake out phase of testing. I can see that this might be huge for delivering things to areas that don't have good road systems where driving a truck over terrain that may cause it to break down might be considered wasteful.

Re:Wasteful, Inefficient, Potentially Dangerous...

[Rei]

I'm just the opposite, I don't understand how this would be good for delivering things to remove, inaccessible areas. They're short-range aircraft, and even if they weren't, you wouldn't want to monopolize an expensive piece of hardware doing one-by-one package deliveries to remote areas, tying it up for an hour or two per package. Here it's short quick hops, then back to charge and be ready to be quickly launched again.

As for the need, it's the same reason as why people choose short delivery periods today. Maybe it's a broken part on your factory line that's costing you a ten thousand dollars an hour. Maybe you're leaving on a trip in an hour and you forgot to pick up something you're going to need. Maybe you're a hospital and speedy delivery could save a patient's life. Maybe you're about to give a presentation at a conference and you discover you need something. Maybe you ran out of petrol and you could really use a couple liters. Maybe you're holding a party and discover you've run of / forgot to pick up some essential item. There's countless reasons why a person may need objects under a couple kilograms delivered quickly - let alone why they may just simply want something quickly (the whole "dammit, I want to be playing around with that new purchase *now*!" attitude)

Beyond speed, if drone delivery takes off (pardon the pun), it could potentially (must stress "potentially") reduce costs for delivery services as well. Ultimately you could completely take humans out of the equation. You're running off of electricity. You need a lot more delivery drones than trucks, but they're also going to be a lot cheaper. Quicker deliveries mean reduced inventory management. Etc. So there's a possibility that it might in the long run prove cheaper. Trucks could increasingly be just for heavy stuff, or paired with drones (aka, the concept of having the truck drive through the general area and drones deliver to the final destination within a few kilometers of the truck as it goes, then returning to its new position, so that the truck doesn't have to weave into every little side street).