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Amazon Promised Drone Delivery In Five Years Five Years Ago (apnews.com)
On December 1, 2013, Amazon announced its plans to deliver packages by drone in just "four or five years" on a 60 Minutes episode with then-host Charlie Rose. As The Associated Press reports, it's officially been five years and drone deliveries seem to be nowhere in sight. "Bezos made billions of dollars by transforming the retail sector," reports The Associated Press. "But overcoming the regulatory hurdles and safety issues posed by drones appears to be a challenge even for the world's wealthiest man." From the report: The day may not be far off when drones will carry medicine to people in rural or remote areas, but the marketing hype around instant delivery of consumer goods looks more and more like just that -- hype. Drones have a short battery life, and privacy concerns can be a hindrance, too. Amazon says it is still pushing ahead with plans to use drones for quick deliveries, though the company is staying away from fixed timelines. "We are committed to making our goal of delivering packages by drones in 30 minutes or less a reality," says Amazon spokeswoman Kristen Kish. The Seattle-based online retail giant says it has drone development centers in the United States, Austria, France, Israel and the United Kingdom.
We're also approaching the year when we were promised self-driving cars. 2018, or ~2017, or 2018. It's going to be a few years of failed predictions.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I can get stuff to my door in two-hours (one hour if I pay extra). That is drone delivery. Similarly, Uber and Lyft already supply on-demand self-driving cars. I mean, sure they can use tech to get people out of the loop, but as a consumer, I don't really care. Do you?
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"60 Minutes episode with then-host Charlie Rose. As The Associated Press reports, it's officially been five years and drone deliveries seem to be nowhere in sight. "
Charlie Rose is not in sight anywhere either.
It just works differently. Every company announces 10 or 20 or 50 nifty sounding ideas from their R&D-labs. And eventually, one of them materializes. But at the time of the announcement, no one knew which of the 10 or 20 or 50 it will be. Otherwise you wouldn't need R&D, because you already knew how to make the ideas work.
in 5 years? Myself and most other realized it was publicity stunt at the time. They got enormous press coverage.
Amazon probably figured out that actual rollout of drones won't be profitable. Items under 5LB are generally low price, low margin. Electronics are an obvious exception but that'd be a small portion of the deliveries. Sure you pay more for drone delivery, but the R&D/rollout costs are high enough it'd take a long time to be profitable, even if it only delivered high-value merchandise like electronics.
The key question to Amazon is if someone who needs something ASAP will buy it via Amazon, or drive to a local store and buy it. Someone who can get to a store quickly is likely in the suburbs/city, so demand for drone delivery won't be so high there. In rural areas, population density versus drone range is so low that it won't be profitable to roll out in the country either.
In other words, actual widescale rollout won't be profitable except maybe for small towns full of electronics nerds (who need that replacement CPU fan/SSD immediately) that are far away from electronics stores. What with some tech companies moving from Silicon Valley to random rural areas, these might actually exist, but probably not enough to justify the R&D. And they'd be betting no Fry's/Best Buy opens nearby. They could target night owls that need a replacement before the retail store opens, but this has to be a small portion of purchases (and they're betting the Fry's doesn't go 24 hour).
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The tech guys usually are not wrong they just believe time to mass market is shorter than it usually is. The first wave investors get burned the same way.
Example in 99 IBM predicted in a Super Bowl ad that checkout free grocery stores were literally right around the corner. Here we are in 2018 and Amazon (Notably not IBM) has finally delivered a few test stores.
Touch Screen Smart Phones. RIM/Microsoft/Handspring etc all tried it; with first gen stuff that really was not far behind iPhone 1 in terms of tech; just lacked polish. All are in the dust bin of history as far as those products go; Apple late to party road theirs to become the most valuable company on earth.
You could say similar things about other tech; MITS never really exactly cleaned up on the Altair but the S100 market was huge for a while. How many Altos did Xerox sell? Not many compared to the number of Macintosh machines that rolled out.
There is a tendency to bring tech out that falls just short of good enough for mass market. You tend to over look your babies flaws and you tend to justify the deficiencies. Its like most power doors on cars. Great idea super handy when you have big bag of groceries in your arms etc. The fist gen stuff in he late 70's 80's though was terrible - nobody had 37 seconds to stand there why their door opened. The people working on that stuff thought probably felt they'd solved the problems; until the market told them "not quite" not its a popular feature
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That has nothing to do with Amazon using drones. Amazon doesn't use drones because it wouldn't work and is a stupid idea. The technology isn't there.
Actually, Amazon did used their own drones for delivery---Amazon Logistics. From many of the surveillance video footage I saw the final several yards was often air delivered when the AMZL drones chuck packages great distances from their cars.
For those that actually believed we'd have drone delivery by now, just wait a few years. Its coming. For those that knew better, there is still only a niche benefit atm, and individual copter style deliver is energy intenstive vs. rolling on wheels. Not even to mention other challenges. Plus, who wants drones flying all over the place?
I suppose if a person live in a treeless housing development in the middle of what used to be a farmer's field, it might make some sense. I'm trying to imagine drone delivery in my neighborhood. It's in a forest. Trees are pretty much everywhere except for the streets.
So Amazon's drones would have to fly at street level with the cars. At that point, you might as well just have a delivery truck,
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Why can't they fly above the trees — only descending to the street level when reaching the target address?
A truck could be used the way air-carriers are used by the Navy — get to the general vicinity of the multiple delivery-destinations, park safely, and deploy drones for the "last mile" part. Multiple devices could be used, with the driver loading them up and replacing batteries as may be needed.
"Regulatory problems" is the key reason — current regulations prohibit operating drones outside of the operator's line of sight...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The *main* problem with quadcopters larger than about 300-500m across isn't regulation, it's math.
I have some and I enjoy flying them. I'm not anti-quad, I'm just pro-reality. To put simply, as the size of a quadcopter increases, the lift from the props is squared as the weight of the craft is cubed.
In other words, as the copter gets bigger, it's gets heavier a lot faster than the props gain lift. It very quickly can't lift itself, much less a package. Tiny quadcopters for flying around indoors are easy to build. A quadcopter 100 meters across is physically impossible, can't be done. In between are varying degrees of difficult to impossible.
Helicopters are a different story. Helicopters can and do have blades much longer than the width of the fuselage. You could do delivery with helicopters.