Drone Delivery Was Supposed to be the Future. What Went Wrong?
Wendover Productions4 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2022–2023
explainer · general · 2022–2023 on HN
Wendover Productions explains why drone delivery has not become the future once promised. It covers no-fly zones, costs and the difficulty of the final drop-off.
It is the standard answer when someone asks what happened to drone delivery.
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5 comments from Hacker News
I think that Wendover has the best summary: ▶ this video Here's the tl;dr: The "last foot" problem is the biggest killer. Getting a drone into the air and to its target is not the hard problem - getting a package safely to the ground at someone's home is. It would require either a very specific neighborhood or a big advance in computer vision and AI tech. Where we have seen success in this space are places with dedicated delivery zones in controlled environments where existing transport infrastructure is not a good alternative. Also this quote: "most people are simply willing to wait two or three days to receive their package while ALL customers wants their packages delivered as cheaply and simply as possible." Uber eats and door dash largely solve the problem that drone delivery was supposed to solve and if you're going to have autonomous delivery doing it via ground robots is much easier than trying to do it from a drone.
There's quite a good video on "Drone Delivery Was Supposed to be the Future. What Went Wrong?". It's been a decade since Bezos launched drone deliveries but it hasn't taken off for a number or reasons including air traffic control around airports, people living in flats and the difficulties of getting a drone to find a safe spot. On the other hand Uber Eats type guys on ebikes have proved a practical solution. ▶ this video
This mini-documentary explains it pretty well: ▶ this video TL;DW: No-fly zones, costs, and drones not being intelligent enough to detect where they are going to drop off packages. It is cheaper and easier to do the last mile via traditional methods than dealing with all the risks and limitations of flying.
They also have a more recent video on general drone delivery: ▶ this video It was really interesting to watch. General idea discusses the problems it faced in the US in seemingly optimal circumstances (airspace restrictions, density, existing delivery networks) and how it does live and help out in other places, highlighting zipline as an example.
It makes it more efficient for delivery by most things. Drone delivery is a mostly-bad or niche idea: ▶ this video