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Amazon Might Be Planning To Use Driverless Cars for Delivery (fortune.com)
Amazon could be eyeing driverless car technology as a way to get items to people's doors faster, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. From an article: It seems nearly every tech and auto giant are now evaluating autonomous vehicle technology. Google-owner Alphabet recently spun out its self-driving car unit, Waymo, into its own subsidiary. Apple was just granted a license in California to test autonomous vehicles. Ford and General Motors are also doubling down on creating autonomous vehicles. Amazon's ambitions, however, may not be to actually build these cars. Instead, the e-commerce giant has a team of around a dozen employees thinking of ways to potentially use the nascent technology to expand its own retail and logistics operations. Operating fleets of driverless trucks to ship items bought from its marketplace could help lower costs for the company.
It is okay if Amazon's cars are driverless . . .
. . . as long as they are also self-driving.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Stop falling for it.
and all of the out of work trucks well just hold up the auto drive cars to get food and other stuff that they need.
and all of the out of work trucks well just hold up the auto drive cars to get food and other stuff that they need.
didn't you ever see maximum overdrive?
There's the question of how the car/truck is going to stop being targeted for theft. I am sure that these cars would be programmed to stop when people are standing in their way -- which would be a perfect way to steal delivery goods. Just have a group of people surround the car/truck at a stop light, and then you pretty much own a bunch of new toys from Amazon. I'll believe it when I see it, I guess.
...and how are the products making their way to your front door from the driverless vehicle?
Once you have fully operational self-driving cars, robots will roam up and down the hallways of apartment complexes to deliver packages. Like the food dispenser robots in Judge Dredd (Stallone).
N/T
Maybe in 5 yeas we will see Amazon or somebody else have a limited market with these things but they won't become ubiquitous for at bleasr 20 years.
Even the cars. I'll keep my new car for another 20 years and then, I'm gonna buy what I can afford.
So, Amazon will use driverless cars to deliver goods. How do you suppose those goods get from the car, to the 3rd floor apartment, or in onto the porch of the house, or if there are special instructions, through the gate and onto the step at the back door? A drone based in the vehicle? I think you're going to have to have someone involved there to get the package to where it needs to go.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
Anyone who owns a delivery or livery fleet is looking at the possibility long term. I suspect regulations and edge cases will delay this to at least 2030 but eventually this will come. In Amazon's case I'm sure it will also involve a mini robot that will take the package from the truck to the door. Probably several of them at once so it can circle back and pick up some.
I expect those same mini robot's to arrive much sooner, as they can be used in the warehouse and are being used right now. Expect the vast number of people employed in their warehouses to drop 90% (or at least the number of employees per package to drop that amount - the way amazon keeps growing year to year the new warehouses will offset that. Forget about WalMart, amazon is the small *and* large town job destroyer.)
Trucking companies are not gonna all just scrap their fleets and fire their owner operators overnight when driverless vehicles become practical. You don't scrap millions f dollars of equipment just because something new comes along.
The hype regarding driverless vehicles is getting to 1999 asinine Silicon Valley levels. Anyone who thinks this is gonna be everywhere in a few years has been suckered by someone's publicity department - probably someone who's driving his 13 year old company not the ground and wants to distract his shareholders from all of their money he's losing.
How long until the average person realizes that it's robots taking the jobs not the Mexicans/immigrants. And then the problem becomes what can we build a wall around to stop them?
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
Does it really matter what Amazon is 'planning'? I was 'planning' on taking Jenna Coleman to dinner on Saturday, but oh, reality. Yawn.
Judging from the amount of money thrown at the problem and results shown so far the driverless cars will be on the roads quite soon, pending local legislation etc, but this decade or early next decade looks very realistic. Will anyone scrap the existing fleets overnight? Obviously not, it will take more than a few years to switch over, nobody could even manufacture that many driverless cars/trucks in a short time, but it will still be a very big change happening relatively fast if the cost benefit plays out as expected.
We are witnessing the start of The Machine from the classic sci-fi story The Machine Stops. We can all sit in our apartments and never see each other face to face. Our jobs will be to entertain each other via social media while The Machine takes care of our basic needs.
I thought the 3D printing revolution meant we can just download what we want and 3D print it at home?
Have I been mislead? Should I also dump my asteroid mining stocks?
How does this help me?
The driver hours (and possibly lower insurance costs) mean that it can be economic to just scrap a working vehicle. However, another reasonable option for the more expensive vehicles would be a retrofit kit.
why would they scrap perfectly viable trucks/cars? it's going to be a matter of adding some software attached to a few motors to control the throttle/steering of an existing vehicle. (The software is the hard part to figure out, while being very cheap to reproduce once sorted out.)
The first time they run into my electronic gate on the property, there will be trouble.
https://youtu.be/e4JuB43oDoA
Than their current delivery people. Leaving my package by the road? YOu lazy moron in a rusted out minivan, walk that thing to the door and press the doorbell button.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Much like McDonald's being in real estate, Amazon functionally is in the logistics business on their non-AWS side. Look at their warehouse ops, and their toe dipping into airplane rental and ocean shipping. They fully understand that automation is critical, and automation involves massive computation (now AKA cloud).
Classic example is flight planning for air taxi's effectively killed the last big push for that industry, because the scheduling is a computationally hard problem. One you get over that, air taxis could probably work as an industry with okay margins. Most air taxi startups from that period employed some real heavyweights in the database design world and some rockstar programmers, and while those companies died, their work did trickle out elsewhere.
So, the moment Boston Dynamics makes a package delivery bot that operates like their Handle prototype (main arms hold a parcel carrier, plus a sub arm or two to open doors and ring doorbells), and level 5 fully autonomous cargo delivery trucks become a thing, Amazon will go for the throat of all delivery companies and invest a huge amount in their own logistics company. Such a delivery logistics company will have such a huge advantage (almost no regular employees, maybe some mechanical turkers to control delivery bots in difficult situations or for customer service, no unions, no pension obligations at start)(reduced cost access to cloud computation for delivery/logistics flow planning) that even the big boys like UPS/FedEx will be hard pressed to follow. Which would effectively kill them, along with many warehousing firms. Small businesses would be effectively forced to warehouse and deliver with Amazon due to the raw cost advantage alone. Amazon will effectively become a major business monopoly in logistics.
In china, this end to end control is also achievable with Alibaba and their AliCloud offering.
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