Check out our second channel Broken Business Models where we discuss unusual or otherwise suspect businesses that may be unviable: www.youtube.com/@BrokenBusinessModels
I also think the same, I mean automatic delivery for land have future but for air with drones that have a lot of problems but the principal is that is extremely dangerous in cities if falls
So much of Silicon Valley over the last decade has been 'you know this thing everyone uses and which works efficiently? What if it was less efficient, more expensive, but we didn't have to pay as many people to make it work in a theoretical sense?'
Don't forget the noise and airspace restrictions. In the UK at least this is a total non-starter since anything under 400ft above ground belongs to the land owner and anything above 400ft belongs to the goverment (and requires you to notify ATC). So either drones fly low and get hit with all kinds of noise and trespassing complaints, or they fly high and fall afoul of aviation law demanding they all have flight plans, IDs and transponders. Both options take the price far above using a man in a van.
@@fix0the0spadei have no idea why they are still bashing their heads against the wall, while never getting anywhere. Air delivery is currently an unviable pipedream... But drone delivery could still be viable... They could just use really small ground based drones which would go slowly enough to pose minimal danger to pedestrians, and those could travel on sidewalks or using bike lanes. It would be way slower than air delivery, but it would remove the weight restrictions, would be much cheaper and safer. Whey could have charging stations Infront of these pick up locations. No special landing area required and it could be a basic charger you can plug in anywhere and each could cost tiny fraction of charging stations for air drones. Also, getting approval for operating these would be far easier than for deploying hundreds of deadly, noisy projectiles which would fly over the city. These ground drones would save them tons of money, would be far more practical and these could actually work... I have no idea why they still haven't tried this instead...
i would think the inability to deliver anywhere without a wide open space outside. you can't deliver to people working in offices or apartment buildings, and lots of customers who use deliver are in these places.
Having worked at tech companies, it cannot be overstated how lemming like they are in terms of following whatever seems like the next fad. They don’t think thru the issues in a thoughtful way. They throw money at things because it’s easier to go along with the crowd, and when it fails years later they will be gone anyway likely, so it will be someone else’s problem. I’ve seen this first hand with many things even a toddler with minimal common sense could have predicted would fail. I mean, can you imagine how noisy even having a few of these drones an hour deliver to your neighborhood would be? I’d be out there with my super soaker practicing my water shooting skills.
No one can predict what is just a fad and what is a new multi-billion dollar disruption. Chasing fad is simply the lowest risk method to make profit. It works, that's why it's repeated over and over again. Internet was often criticized in the 90s as a fad that will never work. If it failed people would be bragging how they knew and how obvious it was. Again - no one knows.
this is a real solid perspective. a lot of tech companies exist just to be sold and then disappear. a lot of it is scams. throw in venture capitalists everywhere trying to put their fingers in the pie and yeah. its quite toxic - you see these entrepreneurial startup 'incubators' and courses at universities etc trying to railroad students with ideas into the whole startup 'ecosystem' they created.
Cool story bro....other than the not mentioning the billions among billions of dollars that have been generated by actual successful tech companies...yeah tEcH cOmPoNy bAd!
I live in rural Ghana, and we have been receiving medicine at the local clinic by drone for more than two years now. However, a new hospital will soon be completed, so I can't see the drones lasting much longer unless the hospital itself uses drones for the smaller clinics being built in the region.
The drone programs in Africa are truly inspiring, and that seems like a good use of the technology to connect the remote areas while they are still hard to reach. Like you said though, once everyone is connected the Drones will be less useful and might go away.
@@UnitSe7enI think that would depend on what you'll call "modern city". However service like Wing can be extremely viable in cities with poor urban planning - like 99% of the cities in USA. Due to poor urban planning (and cultural reasons), there is a phenomenon called "urban sprawl", where suburban accommodation takes a form or extremely branched network with minimal interconnections, at which point, 2 houses 50 m apart by air, can be 10 km apart by road. Also, in USA, they tend to build those collosal shoping centers, surrounded by far and wide ocean of asphalt hellscape. Roofs of such centers, if located close to redidential areas, can be used for both nests and solar arrays to charge them, while allowing for construction of boosting towers around parking lot perimeter…
Just what I need. The auditory equivalent of a leaf blower whizzing past my bedroom window at 6 AM on Sunday morning because my neighbor needs a can of cat food.
Here's a word - weather. Here in Michigan the weather is going to be mostly crappy for the next 5 months. How do package delivery drones handle high winds and rain/snow?
@@Lucas_AntarUnfortunately, what counts as severe weather for a drone of a few dozen kilograms is a lot more restrictive than for plane of a few hundred tons.
I mean if billions of birds in this world is already acceptable to you…. What if we got the tech that quiet that unnoticeable… what’s a few million more birds
"An autonomous drone doesn't get paid," indeed it doesn't need paying, only a team of technically competent support staff, wearing parts replacement, insurance, power, a storage hanger and a $20k up front purchase cost. Bargain.
@@bificommander7472 True, but the support crews will need training to a higher standard than the average delivery driver. Autonomous Aircraft Technician sounds like a prime candidate for the TWU to move in on.
It is if it can replace even a single person on 30 000usd a year. In a single year you would have compensated for the purchase cost and all extras, as the human driver also has a vehicle that needs servicing. After that, a drone becomes much, much cheaper than a human.
Self driving cars are actually progressing though. It is slower going than was hoped for/ hyped up to be, but there is stead progress from the relevant companies, steadily increasing the amount of general factors and specific situations they can handle, and in practice there is a limited amount of both so at some point they'll be there (especialy as the comparison is human drivers, and the avergae driver is quite frankly utter garbage at drivin). Delivery drones are more like flying cars, or hydrogen cars. Base laws of physics and chemistry tell you that it will be unlikely to ever catch up with other options, plus various other ramifications like the massive noise.
self driving cars dont solve any problems and the legal battle involving them are an insurance nightmare for everyone. They are also more expensive than regular cars, so why bother as an endconsumer with stuff like this. @@reappermen
This will sort itself out with the imminent collapse of credit card debt and the worsening trade relations with china. A much cheaper alternative to drones is collection points, which amazon and others already have. Just charge more for home delivery than collection delivery and the rest will sort itself out, except for bulky items.
LOL, you mean fast food deliveries where huge packages are thrown away immediately after 3 minutes of consuming the food. Yep, really GREEN idea to delivery cookies by drone.
Yes. People must make a trip to a store once a week on their way back home from work, and buy whatever they need. Delivery is nonsense. Only time it's justified is if the purchase is not a commodity and bought from a store too far away for traveling yourself.
I can see the point of medical deliveries in remote areas of the world but surely instead of a commercial company it should be run by a competent non profit like medicine sans frontiers.
They don't have the range for anywhere remote, look at military drones, the global hawk is basicly plane size, the predator has a range of 750 miles...
@@TheBestNameEverMadewhile I mostly agree with your statement... Zipline is just motorized gliders and a catapult, and for that application autonomy is pretty much already there.
Yes, those darn humans, always demanding wages that allow them to live. Don’t they know bezos needs billions more than us peasants need a couple ten thousands. Won’t someone think of the poor, dispossessed, tech ceo!!!!! OH THE HUMANITY!!
Well, if they actually get it working.... Think about it, say, 10000 humans with a salary of 30000 usd/year. That is 300 million usd each year you are spending on salaries alone. Now, there are actually more people involved, and the salaries are probably higher. In like 6-7 years you would compensate for your investment, including the equipment costs, after which that 300-500 million dollars you use for salaries is going into your profits. Bottom line is, salaries are one of the largest outlays a company has, and replacing a human with a machine is ALWAYS cheaper in the long run. That is why companies do it. In fact, it was done for the past 300 years at least. The list of jobs completely removed by technology is looooong, and nobody even remembers that we had them at one point. You once had people employed as a walking alarm clock to wake people up for their jobs, and others to light gas lamps in the evening. Taxi, truck, and delivery drivers, writers, coders, and many other jobs will be virtually extinct in 20-30 years at the rate current progress is going. In 70, a kid would not even understand that such a job existed.
You think the companies would have spent a little more effort in the risks associated with drone delivery. Good analysis would have led them to the conclusion "It is not worth the effort". Shows that a lot of start ups function on pure luck alone after choosing something potentially viable.
Problem is that historically many things that ended up being very successful sounded ridiculous to people at the time. Of course that doesn't mean anything that sounds ridiculous will be successful
What happens when we have hundreds of these drones flying over our heads in compact cities? What if they hit someone on the head or damage property? Also, who wants to look up and see the sky full of drones buzzing around? I sound like an old man, but some innovations are just not necessary.
what if the technology matures to make they more silent? This was the same complaint made in the 30's, that cars would create sound poluttion. They do, but it is something you live with, right?
the noise of the cars delivering the same packages make noise as well. But you are used to them now, so you dont complain about those. You will get used to it.
Just the accident insurance costs, amortised over all the deliveries, would make it cheaper to send each delivery via messenger, or Fedex next day. A poor solution in search of a non-existent problem.
Many products/solutions from corporations solve an induced demand. Amazon tries to speed up delivery in hope to increase sales. Just think of a "I could use this right now but i won't need it in two days" type of scenario
By "return" you are referring to the packaging of the hairbrained idea and selling it on to raise a lot of money, then, keeping a lot of that money and squandering the rest till it's gone?@@HNedel
Something important to consider is that just because they're not an economically viable product for a company doesn't mean that they have no future. To use the example in the video of getting medical supplies to remote hospitals; the government could choose to pay the cost of deliveries either with subsidies or by nationalizing the company if they wanted to.
Probably the real future of drone deliveries, a high cost system but one that cost less then building all the road and other infrastructure need for other systems.
That was the thing running through my mind this whole video. If all the logistical and engineering issues can be sorted out, drone delivery's a tech with genuinely unique and beneficial use cases...that can really only be manifested by an entity not relying on it economically (almost certainly a government, but I guess theoretically a large enough company willing to operate it at a loss could manage). Kinda like public transportation, if you think about it...
@@NeutralDrowthe both of you are counting on the fact that governments are separate from markets, but are forgetting that governments also hate spending money. Here in the US, a project/program that will get someone re-elected, like supporting Social Security, will have unlimited funding and support from politicians. Pitching programs they can’t sell to their constituents will at best be DOA.
@@EventHoriXZ0n So governments hate spending money unless it helps them get re-elected. I mean...yeah? Setting aside that my point is that governments have the _capacity_ to support public works that don't directly generate profit (due to a massive pre-existing revenue stream and the ability to print money, something beyond most private means), you appear to be making the point that government also has the _motivation_ to support such public works. Which doesn't contradict what I said.
As someone in the central EU the whole premise of drone delivery has always seemed idiotic to me. We already have Express delivery (DHL, Fedex, UPS, DPD) that can get a package from near Barcelona to Eastern Poland in 1 day for ~20€. Regular shipping (5€ for small package in country) is mostly 2-day between neighboring countries. Amazon can sometimes deliver in as little as 8 hours from order to delivery with ground transport. Where is the market niche for this? Companies that need a part in the next 2 hours? That market simply doesnt have the volume to justify the huge initial investment in fleets and regulatory BS.
I'd say there's a market: the things you could use rn but don't have. Or just think about if people could buy a product they just saw in an ad and get it so soon. Of course this is all really not necessary but it helps drive consumerism even further
Besides that many EU countries have strict regulations if it comes to flying drones. I live next to a rather large military installation which is a strict no fly zone, meaning not only the area itself but also the surrounding area. But in general all residential areas, industrial plants, highways, railroads, military installations, hospitals, jails, airports, power plants are no fly zones. There are some exceptions for smaller drones (250g weight) and professional use, but noise pollution for example would be a big no no.
The silicone valley CEOs are forced to "innovate" like this. 1) "reinvesting" into R&D is a tax write off 2) stockholders expect gains and for that, companies need to keep making up ridiculous ideas, even if they lose money 3) Amazon is desperate for profit... they've barely made any profit at all since starting, instead focusing on "revenue" and FCF to distract from their lack of profit
I live in Galway Ireland, where one of the biggest drone delivery start ups is based , mana drone delivery, the actual reason for it here is Galway is a hotspot for biomedical engineering companies and the drones can act as emergency supply lines if something goes wrong, because production shutdowns can cost billions, thus they are getting huge funding from Boston scientific and Medtronic down here
I can see this. I used to work for a biomedical company in post-manufacturing logistics. I thought our times were crunched...ha! I spoke with a guy on the manufacturing side once who told me about a supply chain issue they had where they wound up flying in a 3/4 empty cargo jet to make sure a just-in-time line kept running. He said the cost of shutting down, and then restarting would have been more expensive than flying the subassemblies in on an almost empty jet.
Judging how planes were banned from breaking the sound barrier (over the US) because of the Concorde. I feel like most towns will ban those drones because of the noise.
not really the same thing- the Sonic Booms sound like a pretty large explosion, so nearby neighborhoods always flood the 911 lines asking about it. From my experience recently with a sonicboom here around D.C, when they were starting to chase down that cessna that went unresponsive on autopilot. I thought a house exploded.
@@austinh1028 They aren't even that loud, though. All Americans still hear them at least every July 4th. Do you know how loud drones are? You can clearly hear their whining when hundreds of feet above. You will hear every single one. No resident would want it near their house. It would face the same problems as affordable housing except it actually provides a hindrance against local homeowners (the people who actually vote in local elections).
@@zeusmultirotor8479 As a armature drone pilot, I can assure you the FAA has absolute and total control over the sky in the U.S. Congress affirmed this in 2018. States and local cities have no authority to regulate the skies even though many have tried to put their own laws on the books. What cities can do is ban landing and takeoff within their property. National parks, wildlife sanctuary, some state parks, prisons, airports, critical infrastructure, stadiums, are all no fly zones as part of the FAA rules.
Thank you for putting this so well. I am tired of trying to explain this to the majority of my friends, who completely believe this is possible and coming soon. Well done!
Missed the critical, key point here. Half the northern part of the USA has brutal winter weather. Six months, mid-October to mid-April, not the warm sunny climes shown in some of the video here. No drone could survive in our weather. Rain, sleet, hail, snow, violent winds, polar vortexes, and so on.
I am sure that will happen, but FAA law make that a felony. It does not matter if its unmanned areal vehicle. The thinking behind that is a drone falling out of the sky could hit and kill someone on the ground or fly into traffic or start a fire because they need a lot of battery power. The kind that can explode.
Package weight, distance, adverse weather, infrastructure costs…it’s amazing that nobody actually crunches the numbers. Like those goofy tiny wheeled delivery vehicles. They fall over and get robbed. It’s like no one calculates what is obvious.
It's bizarre to me how companies are always willing to reduce their wage bills by implementing technology that requires fewer people. If you don't safeguard jobs, who is going to buy your products? Where will you be delivering to exactly? Because the machines that require no days off, lunch breaks, pay cheques or unions also do not need the goods and services you produce...
there will still be enough people to buy the products, no worries. Reducing operational costs makes sense. And wages are probably the highest costs a business has to spend.
RUclips is available in the 194 countries outside the USA. All but 2 of these countries use metric. If you must use an antiquated measurement system, please also include the metric values, if not just in text on screen, so the rest of us can more clearly understand. Thanks!
I've worked in the semiconductor industry since the early 80's, robotics since 85, and have owned and piloted 3 different drones so I'm fairly knowledgeable about their capabilities and limitations. If the drones could be fully autonomous you could eliminate the labor cost, but how many packages is a drone going to deliver in an hour -- maybe two to four at most. How often is the battery going to need to be swapped out -- best case every hour but realistically maybe every 30-40 minutes. How's the battery going to be swapped out, it could be automated but you'd need to design the drone to facilitate that. What do you do in the winter when temps are low? What do you do when it's really windy? What do you do when a kid shoots it with a BB gun or perhaps the family dog takes it out? Wishful thinking!
Two things. 1. Why does it have to be rotary wing drones? 2. Why do they even have to fly? Isn't viable drone delivery going to look much more like a Boston Dynamics dog riding an e-bike?
It will work at some point for high value items like medical supplies but energy and battery prices have to come way down and autonomy has to get a lot better. Maybe another 10 or 20 years.
@@floxy20a lot of critical medical supplies are very expensive and have very short shelf lives. Not practical to keep lots of stuff around, continuously throw it out until months or years later when you finally need it
Small, battery-powered aircraft flying unknown conditions with minimal oversight. What could possibly go wrong? Reminder that we can't even get wind turbines to run above like 20mph winds, and those are specially designed specifically for wild wind conditions.
The problem is that people come to drone delivery thinking that phase one would be to replace the delivery driver in urban areas. The benefit that drone delivery offers initially is for remote areas and niche situations, where it is currently not economical for a driver/van to travel miles to a remote destination just to deliver one package. Drones are already being used by the military, so it doesn't seem such a stretch to deliver packages rather than rockets. There are niche areas where drone delivery makes sense, where it can be done safely and cost effectively. Medical, emergency services, remote delivery are the first steps. Drones replacing the urban local delivery driver that isn't going to happen any time soon because a man with a van is very efficient, versatile delivery system that is well suited to a crowded urban environment.
Excellent report. Many thanks for the insights. One quickie request: please add metric for your viewers outside the USA (like Canada, Australia, etc. Thanks!)
It's just so much less efficient. Now, if they could come up with a large "mother drone" that spawned off smaller drones like these, it would be significantly more efficient in SOME areas (rural / suburbs)
They would need regulatory approval for "beyond visual line of sight" approval, but I honestly think it's possible if they want it enough. If they devoted significant enough resources it will happen; the fundamental technology exists.
@@rileyh4169 no it doesn't exist. Not to do it safely and efficiently. Even if it did work what about all the packages over 2 pounds? That isn't that useful. I briefly worked at UPS most packages were over 2 lbs. Most of them were closer to 50 lbs.
This is all part of the tech bubble (fueled by the financial bubbles) where lucky billionaires create or fund vanity projects of ridiculous size. They over-engineer everything, making it cost ten times more... and it just ends up creating endless obsolescence. Also, please tell me these people were not marketing their delivery drones as somehow being a 'green' solution. We've been living in La La Land for the past two decades. LOL So nuts. Thanks for the videos. Probably good to remember that Silicon Valley was essentially the creation of U.S. defense spending after WWII. So, the over-engineering and obsolescence makes sense I guess.
It's more like "I would rather waste my money on this than paying taxes". At that point you start to understand why techno bros are so quick to invest in these companies.
I'm a drone pilot and instructor. I have no faith in drone delivery. Even with Remote ID, even with BVLOS, even with partial autonomy...I just don't see this being practical.
One problem with drones is that they have complex and delicate electronic systems that are more subject to failure than delivery vans, and when they fail they can plummet to the ground and cause damage or injury. I think it will be many years before they are viable, both from an economic and safety point of view.
@@alexcarter8082 It would still be cheaper to have one guy in a car delver half a dozen pizzas for minimum wage. Plus, all drones need a pilot on the ground to oversee and guide it to it's final destination. Mom and Pop pizza joint is not going to be employing a Drone pilot anytime soon. the pizza would be 3 times the cost.
@@2Bluzin a fleet of UAVs can be monitored by 1 person remotely. So wing or zipline would have one set operators just over looking the whole fleet. Check current FAA laws for how many per but it will scale
Regards long range Drones. Using something akin to a half size Predator to fly semi-autonomously and drop large volumes of items (say a 500lb palette via parachute) could make a lot of sense. It's probably cheaper than a standard plane and if you don't have to land at the drop site that cut's infrastructure costs since even a rough landing strip takes a lot of time and effort compared to painting a big X on the ground.
How do you control the parachute's descent?! And a heavy while would kill a lot of people in any kind of crash, and some will crash. The UK drone uses normal runways (from post office to post office), and uses trucks for local delivery of the packages (total wlload is 80 lbs.).
@@ErikssonTord_2 I was thinking more about extremely remote areas than urban delivery. Drone delivery to anywhere even slightly urbanised makes no sense, but flying a palette out to a farm in the north of Australia, dropping it 1/4 mile from the farm buildings and flying back without landing makes more sense. A Dirt runway needs looking after, plus it needs at least some facilities on the ground. Drop a box and all you need is some guys and a pickup, which are just about everywhere.
Imagine the cost to repair or replace your drones lost to wind, rain, snow, angry homeowner, child with rock or slingshot... You will need human drivers on stamdby in case it starts raining.
Zipline seems the only one of these that has a chance to turn in a profit if not for food deliveries. Turning that 80km of range into hundreds is not at all unfeasible and really opens up their market options.
I can forsee the negative environmental impact. We already have plummeting bird and insect populations. We don't need further airspace disruption. This would be insanely loud and annoying, for humans and animals.
I'm surprised drone's own safety isn't mentioned here. Some evil people would want to snatch these drones if they flew nearby. And also what about no drone zones? if drones can't fly over certain zones, it would be even more difficult to deliver items let alone gaining profit in that area.
There was a story recently of some community complaining that delivery - I can't remember if it was usps or amazon had stopped delivery to them on the grounds that the road was too difficult. The media showed a nice bit of road, but the comments by people who had been there revealed that the road was very winding and had steep drop-offs. This being a former mining town, I surmised that the road may once have started as a mule track. So I can see that a drone delivery could work in a number of places where the driver could park at the bottom and fly the packages to where they need to go. Whether the market for this is as big as jeffy would like it to be is questionable at this point in time. Edit: On the other hand, the drone size required to carry anything of significant weight would take up all the delivery truck space. 😂
The only real use cases I see for drone delivery in the future are subsidized services for remote settlements and fully-autonomous delivery trucks driving to the destination, an releasing a drone just for the doorstep delivery (or rather to a QR-code blanket in the backyard). In the latter case both noise and the abysmally short range aren't a problem, because the drone will just fly for a few seconds each time and the limiting factors are rather capacity and recharging speed. Having such an autonomous way of delivery allows you to save cost on driving staff, with only requiring a few more ramp agents loading the autonomous trucks. At a large enough scale, this could reduce cost despite the added complexity. Conventional delivery would only remain in areas where autonomous trucks and/or final-step-drones aren't feasible. Edit: Ironically, in areas with high minimum wages, autonomous/drone deliveries would be easier to amortize, leading to an net loss of low-skill jobs due to these policies.
My Walmart neighborhood market next to me has the DroneUp tent set up in the parking lot for months but I never bother to check it out until one day when I was out in the yard, I heard this buzzing noise and looked up, there it was on its way for a delivery flying above 1000 ft off the ground. Last week I finally decided to talk to them after actually seeing the same drone fly after I was done shopping. The person told me: Less than 10 lbs, no more than 1 mile radius, the drones have camera on them and costs similar to a brand new car. And right now they are offering free delivery instead of $3.99. It's fun to watch it in operation and it's huge. We'll see how it goes in the next few years.
Drones are mature. They are dirt cheap. They are safe (sorta) The business model itself is nuts. Individually delivering small packages is such a waste of resources. Just throw them in a big truck which is more eco option anyway.
Very good analysis. With so little progress over the last ten years and so many hurdles still left it is very hard to see how drones will play a viable commercial role when it comes to deliveries to regular households. One additional risk factor not mentioned: folks with guns (especially here in the Wild We... um, the US); shooting down drones with packages could become a new theft sport with heavy machines and their payload falling out of the sky.
Also ignores theft. People already rob amazon trucks for packages, and those are in a car protected by a driver. If drones worth thousands of dollars fly around all the time people will shoot them downor hack them to steal them too.
yeah - it's astonishing to me that so many people bought into the idea of drones. maybe it's because i live in west-central scotand but you know... some days it's windy. most days, here. drones can't fly in windy conditions.
Actually, most people I know in the US laughed when they saw Amazon claiming it was going to be able to deliver by drone. It's just common sense there are too many obstacles to that reality. Not to mention people using them as target practice.
These Tech Geeks have loads of money to buy new technologies and become Tech Gods in their minds. They love all this Mechanical Tech because they don't realize that machines break machines break and wear out. This drone is a great idea but impracticable and even dangerous in reality.
Problem with Silicon valley is that software engineers do not work with the physical world and hence are used to building more and more complex software with little in the form of physical or real world resistance. This is why so many real world startups such as WeWork, Theranos and so on fail- because they run into the limitations of the physical world and had not foreseen all the potential problems in the real world in the concept and planning stage.
??? WeWork is literally a rental company. That rents physical space. Theranos is literally a fraud. That literally defrauded its investors, employees and patients. Could the problem be that YOU specifically have something besides brain matter in your head?
Did anyone ever think this could work? Here in New Zealand, no one even bothered trying. Why? Because drones are aircraft, and governed by very strict laws which absolutely and unequivocally made any kind of airborn delivery service completely and totally illegal. Which is fantastic. It's the exact same reason as why a "flying car" can never ever be a thing, because a flying car *IS* an aeroplane. DUH.
the Royal Mail in the UK is doing tests with fixed wing drones doing postal deliveries to Scottish islands. Having drones to do routine deliveries in remote areas on set routes between depot and set delivery points, with the last mile stuff still being done by humans, seems much more likely to succeed. Specially since the alternative is conventional aircraft or infrequent boat trips which are both expensive options in their own right. The average volume of mail is known, so the costs can be calculated, and the mail has to be delivered, so it's not aiming for pure profitability, just being cheaper and more reliable than the existing alternatives. But yeah, i don't see front door drone delivery ever being a thing with our current design of drone. They are too noisy, too short range and too dangerous. Not to mention the risk of having them shot down on route. Not an issue when they're delivering biscuits and cans of Coke. But if they were delivering your average Amazon package that might be an iPhone or a graphics card they would become very tempting targets
For a small tech startup in drone, their objective is to cap in the endless cash in the capital market, the drone business work or not does not really matter, as long as they can sell the ideas to investor.
It is now 2050... We have drones from Amazon, Local Post office, A food delivery company, and, and... My package is dropped on my front lawn, yet when I get home @ 5 pm. it is no longer there. Yet Amazon has a picture of the drone delivery on my front lawn, so not their problem. Do I need to go on?
It cost me about $3 per battery to charge my hobby drone, and it falls below the 250gram ffa limit, I get 5 mins of flight on a good day. I'm like into hobby quad copter and they will never be viable for delivering anything... maybe a gas rail launched wings could be used but a quad is too inefficient in flight to be viable.
I have been building class 2 UAVs for the oast 5 years. The fact that amazon has poured billions into their program and need a 85lb vehicle to deliver a 5lb payload 14 miles round trip absolutely laughable. You can build a quad capable of flying 20 miles with that payload which weighs 20lbs. Amazon are a bunch of clowns. Drone delivery will never work but the vehicles they designed were an absolute disaster
I'm from Helsinki area, and had not even heard of Wing having had a trial here. Vuosaari is an urban area, but it's also at the very easternmost tip of Helsinki away from any commercial aviation and such. I guess that the experiment is not ongoing right now as the info page on the website of the shopping centre they were operating from has been taken down.
Using drones to deliver is like using one car to deliver a single package in a very energy inefficient way. It’s why we use trucks instead of cars to deliver goods from a to b. Trucks could deliver multiple goods to multiple location at once
There's actually a really successful drone delivery company called Zipline International Inc. They deliver urgent medical blood supplies by drone and parachute to remote locations. So it's horses for courses.
There are still companies testing the viability of drone deliveries of pharmaceutical's. You will never see drone deliveries in cities or built up areas due to most cities forbidding drone operations except under special operating permits on a flight by flight basis.
Next time they will come with a cannon shooting packages to your doorstep. Delivery almost instant and with no noise. Announce it and your company will have 20B market cap overnight. Also mention it will be operated by AI and it will be 100B company.
Check out our second channel Broken Business Models where we discuss unusual or otherwise suspect businesses that may be unviable: www.youtube.com/@BrokenBusinessModels
I also think the same, I mean automatic delivery for land have future but for air with drones that have a lot of problems but the principal is that is extremely dangerous in cities if falls
So much of Silicon Valley over the last decade has been 'you know this thing everyone uses and which works efficiently? What if it was less efficient, more expensive, but we didn't have to pay as many people to make it work in a theoretical sense?'
Its all leftist propaganda yes
Silicone valley has always been about innovation and disruption. Things like actually being better, more efficient or even working are secondary.
but also "whatever it is, it would be cooler if it could fly. old pictures in sci-fi novels promised us everything would fly one day."
That’s the entire modern landscape. Reinventing things worse for no reason other than they get to reinvent it.
It's like they literally hate people. People need work....greedy effs....
The weight limits are the biggest downside. I knew this would be the case when I first heard about drone delivery 10 years ago.
Don't forget the noise and airspace restrictions. In the UK at least this is a total non-starter since anything under 400ft above ground belongs to the land owner and anything above 400ft belongs to the goverment (and requires you to notify ATC). So either drones fly low and get hit with all kinds of noise and trespassing complaints, or they fly high and fall afoul of aviation law demanding they all have flight plans, IDs and transponders. Both options take the price far above using a man in a van.
@@fix0the0spadei have no idea why they are still bashing their heads against the wall, while never getting anywhere. Air delivery is currently an unviable pipedream... But drone delivery could still be viable...
They could just use really small ground based drones which would go slowly enough to pose minimal danger to pedestrians, and those could travel on sidewalks or using bike lanes. It would be way slower than air delivery, but it would remove the weight restrictions, would be much cheaper and safer. Whey could have charging stations Infront of these pick up locations. No special landing area required and it could be a basic charger you can plug in anywhere and each could cost tiny fraction of charging stations for air drones.
Also, getting approval for operating these would be far easier than for deploying hundreds of deadly, noisy projectiles which would fly over the city.
These ground drones would save them tons of money, would be far more practical and these could actually work... I have no idea why they still haven't tried this instead...
i would think the inability to deliver anywhere without a wide open space outside. you can't deliver to people working in offices or apartment buildings, and lots of customers who use deliver are in these places.
@@mitotakjde9763 Ground based "drones" have been tried in California, and the homeless people beat them up and knocked them over! :)
Maybe switch to gas rather than the inefficient lithium batteries.
Having worked at tech companies, it cannot be overstated how lemming like they are in terms of following whatever seems like the next fad. They don’t think thru the issues in a thoughtful way. They throw money at things because it’s easier to go along with the crowd, and when it fails years later they will be gone anyway likely, so it will be someone else’s problem. I’ve seen this first hand with many things even a toddler with minimal common sense could have predicted would fail.
I mean, can you imagine how noisy even having a few of these drones an hour deliver to your neighborhood would be? I’d be out there with my super soaker practicing my water shooting skills.
I don't think these people care about things like noise pollution
No one can predict what is just a fad and what is a new multi-billion dollar disruption. Chasing fad is simply the lowest risk method to make profit. It works, that's why it's repeated over and over again. Internet was often criticized in the 90s as a fad that will never work. If it failed people would be bragging how they knew and how obvious it was. Again - no one knows.
Lmaoo same, if I have to deal with such buzzing every day I would be an enemy to these drones
this is a real solid perspective. a lot of tech companies exist just to be sold and then disappear. a lot of it is scams. throw in venture capitalists everywhere trying to put their fingers in the pie and yeah. its quite toxic - you see these entrepreneurial startup 'incubators' and courses at universities etc trying to railroad students with ideas into the whole startup 'ecosystem' they created.
Cool story bro....other than the not mentioning the billions among billions of dollars that have been generated by actual successful tech companies...yeah tEcH cOmPoNy bAd!
I live in rural Ghana, and we have been receiving medicine at the local clinic by drone for more than two years now. However, a new hospital will soon be completed, so I can't see the drones lasting much longer unless the hospital itself uses drones for the smaller clinics being built in the region.
The drone programs in Africa are truly inspiring, and that seems like a good use of the technology to connect the remote areas while they are still hard to reach. Like you said though, once everyone is connected the Drones will be less useful and might go away.
That's a very specific use case, and seems like it's been successful. Amazon delivering boxes in our modern cities not so much.
@@UnitSe7enI think that would depend on what you'll call "modern city".
However service like Wing can be extremely viable in cities with poor urban planning - like 99% of the cities in USA.
Due to poor urban planning (and cultural reasons), there is a phenomenon called "urban sprawl", where suburban accommodation takes a form or extremely branched network with minimal interconnections, at which point, 2 houses 50 m apart by air, can be 10 km apart by road.
Also, in USA, they tend to build those collosal shoping centers, surrounded by far and wide ocean of asphalt hellscape.
Roofs of such centers, if located close to redidential areas, can be used for both nests and solar arrays to charge them, while allowing for construction of boosting towers around parking lot perimeter…
Just what I need. The auditory equivalent of a leaf blower whizzing past my bedroom window at 6 AM on Sunday morning because my neighbor needs a can of cat food.
you're making it sound like it was a bad thing.
Here's a word - weather. Here in Michigan the weather is going to be mostly crappy for the next 5 months. How do package delivery drones handle high winds and rain/snow?
They stay on the ground :>
They don’t just like planes they would obviously be grounded during severe weather.
@@Lucas_AntarUnfortunately, what counts as severe weather for a drone of a few dozen kilograms is a lot more restrictive than for plane of a few hundred tons.
"How heavy drown downfall are we going to expect next week? Will it be safe to go outside again?"
Give them umbrellas.
Can you see hundreds of these things buzzing around and crashing everywhere?
And kids throwing rocks at them to knock them down for fun.
This is another bad idea
You mean like in Russian occupied Ukrainian territories.
It never made any sense. It has all the safety problems of self driving but with bad economics. Even if they got it to work it would be useless.
Or being ripped apart in a tornado 🌪️
I mean if billions of birds in this world is already acceptable to you…. What if we got the tech that quiet that unnoticeable… what’s a few million more birds
"An autonomous drone doesn't get paid," indeed it doesn't need paying, only a team of technically competent support staff, wearing parts replacement, insurance, power, a storage hanger and a $20k up front purchase cost. Bargain.
"It can't unionize" was probably a big selling point at Amazon.
@@bificommander7472 True, but the support crews will need training to a higher standard than the average delivery driver. Autonomous Aircraft Technician sounds like a prime candidate for the TWU to move in on.
Yeah that's much cheaper than a delivery person on a scooter, totally.
It is if it can replace even a single person on 30 000usd a year. In a single year you would have compensated for the purchase cost and all extras, as the human driver also has a vehicle that needs servicing. After that, a drone becomes much, much cheaper than a human.
@@phoenix211245what about repairs and maintenance?
Drone delivery and self-driving cars - Silicon Valley dreams...
Self driving cars are actually progressing though.
It is slower going than was hoped for/ hyped up to be, but there is stead progress from the relevant companies, steadily increasing the amount of general factors and specific situations they can handle, and in practice there is a limited amount of both so at some point they'll be there (especialy as the comparison is human drivers, and the avergae driver is quite frankly utter garbage at drivin).
Delivery drones are more like flying cars, or hydrogen cars. Base laws of physics and chemistry tell you that it will be unlikely to ever catch up with other options, plus various other ramifications like the massive noise.
self driving cars dont solve any problems and the legal battle involving them are an insurance nightmare for everyone. They are also more expensive than regular cars, so why bother as an endconsumer with stuff like this.
@@reappermen
Yet it works for medical purposes
And drone delivery *of* self-driving cars.
@@Ciboriumor self driving car delivery of self driving drones
I just love how you put all of us into the real world, Great job!!
The left younger millennials and older zoomers are garbage they are never in the real world
We don't need more delivery methods. We need fewer purchases of cheap plastic products that end up in a landfill in a couple of years.
So true.
This will sort itself out with the imminent collapse of credit card debt and the worsening trade relations with china.
A much cheaper alternative to drones is collection points, which amazon and others already have. Just charge more for home delivery than collection delivery and the rest will sort itself out, except for bulky items.
LOL, you mean fast food deliveries where huge packages are thrown away immediately after 3 minutes of consuming the food. Yep, really GREEN idea to delivery cookies by drone.
Yes. People must make a trip to a store once a week on their way back home from work, and buy whatever they need. Delivery is nonsense. Only time it's justified is if the purchase is not a commodity and bought from a store too far away for traveling yourself.
I can see the point of medical deliveries in remote areas of the world but surely instead of a commercial company it should be run by a competent non profit like medicine sans frontiers.
Non-profit is not going to innovative as fast to bring the costs down. Non-profits don't take the risk nessary for that.
Why couldn't they, innovation is not only limited to the profit motive, they'd just need to be set up correctly.
They don't have the range for anywhere remote, look at military drones, the global hawk is basicly plane size, the predator has a range of 750 miles...
@@TheBestNameEverMadewhile I mostly agree with your statement... Zipline is just motorized gliders and a catapult, and for that application autonomy is pretty much already there.
The amount of money and time companies are willing to spend in order to NOT pay humans to do their jobs 🙄
The Great Reset
Because humans complain and demand benefits, the costs add up pretty quick
@@luisvilca4467 Wont cost more than a conceptually flawed distribution model
Yes, those darn humans, always demanding wages that allow them to live. Don’t they know bezos needs billions more than us peasants need a couple ten thousands. Won’t someone think of the poor, dispossessed, tech ceo!!!!! OH THE HUMANITY!!
Well, if they actually get it working.... Think about it, say, 10000 humans with a salary of 30000 usd/year. That is 300 million usd each year you are spending on salaries alone. Now, there are actually more people involved, and the salaries are probably higher. In like 6-7 years you would compensate for your investment, including the equipment costs, after which that 300-500 million dollars you use for salaries is going into your profits.
Bottom line is, salaries are one of the largest outlays a company has, and replacing a human with a machine is ALWAYS cheaper in the long run. That is why companies do it. In fact, it was done for the past 300 years at least. The list of jobs completely removed by technology is looooong, and nobody even remembers that we had them at one point. You once had people employed as a walking alarm clock to wake people up for their jobs, and others to light gas lamps in the evening. Taxi, truck, and delivery drivers, writers, coders, and many other jobs will be virtually extinct in 20-30 years at the rate current progress is going. In 70, a kid would not even understand that such a job existed.
You think the companies would have spent a little more effort in the risks associated with drone delivery. Good analysis would have led them to the conclusion "It is not worth the effort". Shows that a lot of start ups function on pure luck alone after choosing something potentially viable.
Problem is that historically many things that ended up being very successful sounded ridiculous to people at the time. Of course that doesn't mean anything that sounds ridiculous will be successful
Mate, the young dreamers want to upset the established businesses.
@@tomlxyzlike what
@user-vo9wd6tx6cthat's why most people are investing in self sustainability
Pure ideology more like. They want to cut out the workers.
What happens when we have hundreds of these drones flying over our heads in compact cities? What if they hit someone on the head or damage property? Also, who wants to look up and see the sky full of drones buzzing around? I sound like an old man, but some innovations are just not necessary.
what if the technology matures to make they more silent?
This was the same complaint made in the 30's, that cars would create sound poluttion. They do, but it is something you live with, right?
the noise of the cars delivering the same packages make noise as well. But you are used to them now, so you dont complain about those. You will get used to it.
@@hydrohasspoken6227lmao "this will ruin living but it'll be fine you'll get used to it"
Just the accident insurance costs, amortised over all the deliveries, would make it cheaper to send each delivery via messenger, or Fedex next day. A poor solution in search of a non-existent problem.
This tends to happen when capital is cheap and searching for any kind of hairbrained ideas on how to make a return.
Many products/solutions from corporations solve an induced demand. Amazon tries to speed up delivery in hope to increase sales. Just think of a "I could use this right now but i won't need it in two days" type of scenario
By "return" you are referring to the packaging of the hairbrained idea and selling it on to raise a lot of money, then, keeping a lot of that money and squandering the rest till it's gone?@@HNedel
Something important to consider is that just because they're not an economically viable product for a company doesn't mean that they have no future. To use the example in the video of getting medical supplies to remote hospitals; the government could choose to pay the cost of deliveries either with subsidies or by nationalizing the company if they wanted to.
Probably the real future of drone deliveries, a high cost system but one that cost less then building all the road and other infrastructure need for other systems.
That was the thing running through my mind this whole video. If all the logistical and engineering issues can be sorted out, drone delivery's a tech with genuinely unique and beneficial use cases...that can really only be manifested by an entity not relying on it economically (almost certainly a government, but I guess theoretically a large enough company willing to operate it at a loss could manage).
Kinda like public transportation, if you think about it...
A VERY small future, but it might be there...
@@NeutralDrowthe both of you are counting on the fact that governments are separate from markets, but are forgetting that governments also hate spending money. Here in the US, a project/program that will get someone re-elected, like supporting Social Security, will have unlimited funding and support from politicians.
Pitching programs they can’t sell to their constituents will at best be DOA.
@@EventHoriXZ0n So governments hate spending money unless it helps them get re-elected. I mean...yeah?
Setting aside that my point is that governments have the _capacity_ to support public works that don't directly generate profit (due to a massive pre-existing revenue stream and the ability to print money, something beyond most private means), you appear to be making the point that government also has the _motivation_ to support such public works.
Which doesn't contradict what I said.
As someone in the central EU the whole premise of drone delivery has always seemed idiotic to me. We already have Express delivery (DHL, Fedex, UPS, DPD) that can get a package from near Barcelona to Eastern Poland in 1 day for ~20€. Regular shipping (5€ for small package in country) is mostly 2-day between neighboring countries. Amazon can sometimes deliver in as little as 8 hours from order to delivery with ground transport.
Where is the market niche for this? Companies that need a part in the next 2 hours? That market simply doesnt have the volume to justify the huge initial investment in fleets and regulatory BS.
I'd say there's a market: the things you could use rn but don't have. Or just think about if people could buy a product they just saw in an ad and get it so soon. Of course this is all really not necessary but it helps drive consumerism even further
@@tomlxyzwhich means it's not necessary. Shouldn't we had enough of this consumerism bullshit?
Besides that many EU countries have strict regulations if it comes to flying drones. I live next to a rather large military installation which is a strict no fly zone, meaning not only the area itself but also the surrounding area. But in general all residential areas, industrial plants, highways, railroads, military installations, hospitals, jails, airports, power plants are no fly zones. There are some exceptions for smaller drones (250g weight) and professional use, but noise pollution for example would be a big no no.
@@sikachukuning2473 how can you have enough money?
Because you are in central EU, with actual cities and not suburban hell of good old US.
This is what happens when you have a lot of free money roaming around. It creates so called foolish entrepreneurs with an innovative idea 😂
The silicone valley CEOs are forced to "innovate" like this.
1) "reinvesting" into R&D is a tax write off
2) stockholders expect gains and for that, companies need to keep making up ridiculous ideas, even if they lose money
3) Amazon is desperate for profit... they've barely made any profit at all since starting, instead focusing on "revenue" and FCF to distract from their lack of profit
if one drone delivering food makes all that noise, I cannot even imagine hundreds if not thousands of them flying around at noon in a busy area.
Drones have exactly three purposes
1. Recreation for kids in lieu of kites
2. Reconnaissance
3. Assassination
I live in Galway Ireland, where one of the biggest drone delivery start ups is based , mana drone delivery, the actual reason for it here is Galway is a hotspot for biomedical engineering companies and the drones can act as emergency supply lines if something goes wrong, because production shutdowns can cost billions, thus they are getting huge funding from Boston scientific and Medtronic down here
Definitely a mass market product here worth billions developing.
I can see this. I used to work for a biomedical company in post-manufacturing logistics. I thought our times were crunched...ha! I spoke with a guy on the manufacturing side once who told me about a supply chain issue they had where they wound up flying in a 3/4 empty cargo jet to make sure a just-in-time line kept running. He said the cost of shutting down, and then restarting would have been more expensive than flying the subassemblies in on an almost empty jet.
Judging how planes were banned from breaking the sound barrier (over the US) because of the Concorde. I feel like most towns will ban those drones because of the noise.
not really the same thing- the Sonic Booms sound like a pretty large explosion, so nearby neighborhoods always flood the 911 lines asking about it.
From my experience recently with a sonicboom here around D.C, when they were starting to chase down that cessna that went unresponsive on autopilot. I thought a house exploded.
The way the FAA had authority of aircraft local government might not be able to regulate. Probably all federal laws control
@@austinh1028 They aren't even that loud, though. All Americans still hear them at least every July 4th. Do you know how loud drones are? You can clearly hear their whining when hundreds of feet above. You will hear every single one. No resident would want it near their house. It would face the same problems as affordable housing except it actually provides a hindrance against local homeowners (the people who actually vote in local elections).
@@zeusmultirotor8479local government could still go after the noise
@@zeusmultirotor8479 As a armature drone pilot, I can assure you the FAA has absolute and total control over the sky in the U.S. Congress affirmed this in 2018. States and local cities have no authority to regulate the skies even though many have tried to put their own laws on the books. What cities can do is ban landing and takeoff within their property. National parks, wildlife sanctuary, some state parks, prisons, airports, critical infrastructure, stadiums, are all no fly zones as part of the FAA rules.
I live in NYC in an apartment building. This is a non-starter in the most populous areas of the country.
Thank you for putting this so well. I am tired of trying to explain this to the majority of my friends, who completely believe this is possible and coming soon. Well done!
We can't get autonomous vehicles to work on the surface yet...
Missed the critical, key point here. Half the northern part of the USA has brutal winter weather. Six months, mid-October to mid-April, not the warm sunny climes shown in some of the video here. No drone could survive in our weather. Rain, sleet, hail, snow, violent winds, polar vortexes, and so on.
I'm just imagining someone getting really annoyed with the noise and shooting the things out of the sky or finding some other way to destroy them.
I am sure that will happen, but FAA law make that a felony. It does not matter if its unmanned areal vehicle. The thinking behind that is a drone falling out of the sky could hit and kill someone on the ground or fly into traffic or start a fire because they need a lot of battery power. The kind that can explode.
Package weight, distance, adverse weather, infrastructure costs…it’s amazing that nobody actually crunches the numbers. Like those goofy tiny wheeled delivery vehicles. They fall over and get robbed. It’s like no one calculates what is obvious.
It's bizarre to me how companies are always willing to reduce their wage bills by implementing technology that requires fewer people. If you don't safeguard jobs, who is going to buy your products? Where will you be delivering to exactly? Because the machines that require no days off, lunch breaks, pay cheques or unions also do not need the goods and services you produce...
there will still be enough people to buy the products, no worries.
Reducing operational costs makes sense. And wages are probably the highest costs a business has to spend.
@@hydrohasspoken6227 FedEx delivery is 1/3 fuel, 1/3 labor, and 1/3 mgt/maintenance.
@@hydrohasspoken6227of course, with everyone on welfare they'll have socialized their expenses completely.
There was a time some months ago when every second pitch deck I received for angel investing was either AI or drones or AI drones...
RUclips is available in the 194 countries outside the USA. All but 2 of these countries use metric. If you must use an antiquated measurement system, please also include the metric values, if not just in text on screen, so the rest of us can more clearly understand. Thanks!
I've worked in the semiconductor industry since the early 80's, robotics since 85, and have owned and piloted 3 different drones so I'm fairly knowledgeable about their capabilities and limitations. If the drones could be fully autonomous you could eliminate the labor cost, but how many packages is a drone going to deliver in an hour -- maybe two to four at most. How often is the battery going to need to be swapped out -- best case every hour but realistically maybe every 30-40 minutes. How's the battery going to be swapped out, it could be automated but you'd need to design the drone to facilitate that. What do you do in the winter when temps are low? What do you do when it's really windy? What do you do when a kid shoots it with a BB gun or perhaps the family dog takes it out? Wishful thinking!
Two things.
1. Why does it have to be rotary wing drones?
2. Why do they even have to fly?
Isn't viable drone delivery going to look much more like a Boston Dynamics dog riding an e-bike?
Theft. Unless they give the dog sharp teeth and the know-how to use it appropriately.
It will work at some point for high value items like medical supplies but energy and battery prices have to come way down and autonomy has to get a lot better. Maybe another 10 or 20 years.
it already works for medical supplies in some african countries, but they launch a plane-like slingshot launched drone, that airdrops the whole thing
@@nickxx9729they don't have rednecks with shotguns there. Good luck in Arkansas.
Or, you could just manage the hospital inventory better. You know, order a lot and order more before you run out. But where's the fun in that?
@@floxy20a lot of critical medical supplies are very expensive and have very short shelf lives. Not practical to keep lots of stuff around, continuously throw it out until months or years later when you finally need it
In a world where tweekers steal the copper out of street lights you can't multi thousand dollar robots flying all over the place.
Apparently, drone delivery seems to be working pretty well in ukraine.
Good one.
@@tripplefives1402
Usually they have a blast.
Although some operators hear loud complaints from kilometers away.
Small, battery-powered aircraft flying unknown conditions with minimal oversight. What could possibly go wrong?
Reminder that we can't even get wind turbines to run above like 20mph winds, and those are specially designed specifically for wild wind conditions.
Drones can do more then 20 mph
The problem is that people come to drone delivery thinking that phase one would be to replace the delivery driver in urban areas.
The benefit that drone delivery offers initially is for remote areas and niche situations, where it is currently not economical for a driver/van to travel miles to a remote destination just to deliver one package. Drones are already being used by the military, so it doesn't seem such a stretch to deliver packages rather than rockets.
There are niche areas where drone delivery makes sense, where it can be done safely and cost effectively. Medical, emergency services, remote delivery are the first steps.
Drones replacing the urban local delivery driver that isn't going to happen any time soon because a man with a van is very efficient, versatile delivery system that is well suited to a crowded urban environment.
Excellent report. Many thanks for the insights. One quickie request: please add metric for your viewers outside the USA (like Canada, Australia, etc. Thanks!)
Forget drones, where's my flying jetson car? (Sarcasm)
It's just so much less efficient. Now, if they could come up with a large "mother drone" that spawned off smaller drones like these, it would be significantly more efficient in SOME areas (rural / suburbs)
They would need regulatory approval for "beyond visual line of sight" approval, but I honestly think it's possible if they want it enough. If they devoted significant enough resources it will happen; the fundamental technology exists.
@@rileyh4169 no it doesn't exist. Not to do it safely and efficiently. Even if it did work what about all the packages over 2 pounds? That isn't that useful. I briefly worked at UPS most packages were over 2 lbs. Most of them were closer to 50 lbs.
Sounds like an Ace Combat bossfight
@@homerj806maybe all this companies are just using package delivery as a front...
This sounds like the idea Workhorse had, where a drone can be launched from a delivery van for the deliveries that are less efficient to drive to.
This is all part of the tech bubble (fueled by the financial bubbles) where lucky billionaires create or fund vanity projects of ridiculous size. They over-engineer everything, making it cost ten times more... and it just ends up creating endless obsolescence. Also, please tell me these people were not marketing their delivery drones as somehow being a 'green' solution. We've been living in La La Land for the past two decades. LOL So nuts. Thanks for the videos.
Probably good to remember that Silicon Valley was essentially the creation of U.S. defense spending after WWII. So, the over-engineering and obsolescence makes sense I guess.
It's more like "I would rather waste my money on this than paying taxes". At that point you start to understand why techno bros are so quick to invest in these companies.
its like people in 1900 telling its imposible to power all street light with electricity so we're gona keep using whale oil fire
I'm a drone pilot and instructor. I have no faith in drone delivery. Even with Remote ID, even with BVLOS, even with partial autonomy...I just don't see this being practical.
One problem with drones is that they have complex and delicate electronic systems that are more subject to failure than delivery vans, and when they fail they can plummet to the ground and cause damage or injury. I think it will be many years before they are viable, both from an economic and safety point of view.
I never realized the things were so damn loud
The biggest X-factor: "...weather permitting!"
Drone delivery would need to be site specific. In other words, the local pizza shop owns the drone, loads and launches it themselves.
The drones could make the last mile, like a delivery truck driving to an area, letting all drones free and they fly to their destination
@@tomlxyz then you’d need A LOT MORE DRONES.
That’s what zipline is doing. Install drone dock at your local restraunt or shop and deliver to you.
@@alexcarter8082 It would still be cheaper to have one guy in a car delver half a dozen pizzas for minimum wage. Plus, all drones need a pilot on the ground to oversee and guide it to it's final destination. Mom and Pop pizza joint is not going to be employing a Drone pilot anytime soon. the pizza would be 3 times the cost.
@@2Bluzin a fleet of UAVs can be monitored by 1 person remotely. So wing or zipline would have one set operators just over looking the whole fleet. Check current FAA laws for how many per but it will scale
Regards long range Drones. Using something akin to a half size Predator to fly semi-autonomously and drop large volumes of items (say a 500lb palette via parachute) could make a lot of sense. It's probably cheaper than a standard plane and if you don't have to land at the drop site that cut's infrastructure costs since even a rough landing strip takes a lot of time and effort compared to painting a big X on the ground.
How do you control the parachute's descent?! And a heavy while would kill a lot of people in any kind of crash, and some will crash. The UK drone uses normal runways (from post office to post office), and uses trucks for local delivery of the packages (total wlload is 80 lbs.).
@@ErikssonTord_2 I was thinking more about extremely remote areas than urban delivery. Drone delivery to anywhere even slightly urbanised makes no sense, but flying a palette out to a farm in the north of Australia, dropping it 1/4 mile from the farm buildings and flying back without landing makes more sense. A Dirt runway needs looking after, plus it needs at least some facilities on the ground. Drop a box and all you need is some guys and a pickup, which are just about everywhere.
Imagine the cost to repair or replace your drones lost to wind, rain, snow, angry homeowner, child with rock or slingshot...
You will need human drivers on stamdby in case it starts raining.
Zipline seems the only one of these that has a chance to turn in a profit if not for food deliveries.
Turning that 80km of range into hundreds is not at all unfeasible and really opens up their market options.
Imagine ordering tons of small item for 30mins delivery during midnight and 10 drones come. Wake up everyone around you xD
Amazon delivery driver - $40,000/year. Amazon certified drone pilot - $250,000/year.
I can forsee the negative environmental impact. We already have plummeting bird and insect populations. We don't need further airspace disruption. This would be insanely loud and annoying, for humans and animals.
I'm surprised drone's own safety isn't mentioned here. Some evil people would want to snatch these drones if they flew nearby. And also what about no drone zones? if drones can't fly over certain zones, it would be even more difficult to deliver items let alone gaining profit in that area.
There was a story recently of some community complaining that delivery - I can't remember if it was usps or amazon had stopped delivery to them on the grounds that the road was too difficult. The media showed a nice bit of road, but the comments by people who had been there revealed that the road was very winding and had steep drop-offs. This being a former mining town, I surmised that the road may once have started as a mule track. So I can see that a drone delivery could work in a number of places where the driver could park at the bottom and fly the packages to where they need to go. Whether the market for this is as big as jeffy would like it to be is questionable at this point in time.
Edit: On the other hand, the drone size required to carry anything of significant weight would take up all the delivery truck space. 😂
The only real use cases I see for drone delivery in the future are subsidized services for remote settlements and fully-autonomous delivery trucks driving to the destination, an releasing a drone just for the doorstep delivery (or rather to a QR-code blanket in the backyard). In the latter case both noise and the abysmally short range aren't a problem, because the drone will just fly for a few seconds each time and the limiting factors are rather capacity and recharging speed. Having such an autonomous way of delivery allows you to save cost on driving staff, with only requiring a few more ramp agents loading the autonomous trucks. At a large enough scale, this could reduce cost despite the added complexity. Conventional delivery would only remain in areas where autonomous trucks and/or final-step-drones aren't feasible.
Edit: Ironically, in areas with high minimum wages, autonomous/drone deliveries would be easier to amortize, leading to an net loss of low-skill jobs due to these policies.
Nice documentary. Well-researched. Thanks!
My Walmart neighborhood market next to me has the DroneUp tent set up in the parking lot for months but I never bother to check it out until one day when I was out in the yard, I heard this buzzing noise and looked up, there it was on its way for a delivery flying above 1000 ft off the ground. Last week I finally decided to talk to them after actually seeing the same drone fly after I was done shopping. The person told me: Less than 10 lbs, no more than 1 mile radius, the drones have camera on them and costs similar to a brand new car. And right now they are offering free delivery instead of $3.99. It's fun to watch it in operation and it's huge. We'll see how it goes in the next few years.
Drones are mature. They are dirt cheap. They are safe (sorta) The business model itself is nuts. Individually delivering small packages is such a waste of resources. Just throw them in a big truck which is more eco option anyway.
Self flying drones are not mature. And without that they're useless for delivery
Thank God My neighborhood is jammed full of 100-year-old oak and maple trees.
2:24 Bravo for how you teed up that joke...absolutely was NOT expecting that outcome hahahaha
Say good bye to selfies without drones in the background! 😂😂😂😂
pretty wild that these drones cant even carry a hamburger and fries.
Very good analysis. With so little progress over the last ten years and so many hurdles still left it is very hard to see how drones will play a viable commercial role when it comes to deliveries to regular households. One additional risk factor not mentioned: folks with guns (especially here in the Wild We... um, the US); shooting down drones with packages could become a new theft sport with heavy machines and their payload falling out of the sky.
Also ignores theft. People already rob amazon trucks for packages, and those are in a car protected by a driver. If drones worth thousands of dollars fly around all the time people will shoot them downor hack them to steal them too.
I think orbital bombardment would probably be more realistic than drones
yeah - it's astonishing to me that so many people bought into the idea of drones. maybe it's because i live in west-central scotand but you know... some days it's windy. most days, here. drones can't fly in windy conditions.
Actually, most people I know in the US laughed when they saw Amazon claiming it was going to be able to deliver by drone. It's just common sense there are too many obstacles to that reality. Not to mention people using them as target practice.
Wow, who knew having thousands of health and safety hazards whizzing through the sky wouldn’t catch on?
Ukraine would like to employ Amazon's drone delivery department.
Drone deliveries are always a bad idea.
We need to face it, unless we have fusion, we will be earthbound. No big inventions will arrive, just optimizing what we already have
Not when you need an organ or blood transplant in a remote area.
These Tech Geeks have loads of money to buy new technologies and become Tech Gods in their minds.
They love all this Mechanical Tech because they don't realize that machines break machines break and wear out.
This drone is a great idea but impracticable and even dangerous in reality.
Problem with Silicon valley is that software engineers do not work with the physical world and hence are used to building more and more complex software with little in the form of physical or real world resistance. This is why so many real world startups such as WeWork, Theranos and so on fail- because they run into the limitations of the physical world and had not foreseen all the potential problems in the real world in the concept and planning stage.
???
WeWork is literally a rental company. That rents physical space.
Theranos is literally a fraud. That literally defrauded its investors, employees and patients.
Could the problem be that YOU specifically have something besides brain matter in your head?
Did anyone ever think this could work?
Here in New Zealand, no one even bothered trying. Why? Because drones are aircraft, and governed by very strict laws which absolutely and unequivocally made any kind of airborn delivery service completely and totally illegal. Which is fantastic.
It's the exact same reason as why a "flying car" can never ever be a thing, because a flying car *IS* an aeroplane. DUH.
The only practical drone delivery I’ve seen is where urgent medicine was sent from the mainland to a close island.
the Royal Mail in the UK is doing tests with fixed wing drones doing postal deliveries to Scottish islands. Having drones to do routine deliveries in remote areas on set routes between depot and set delivery points, with the last mile stuff still being done by humans, seems much more likely to succeed. Specially since the alternative is conventional aircraft or infrequent boat trips which are both expensive options in their own right. The average volume of mail is known, so the costs can be calculated, and the mail has to be delivered, so it's not aiming for pure profitability, just being cheaper and more reliable than the existing alternatives.
But yeah, i don't see front door drone delivery ever being a thing with our current design of drone. They are too noisy, too short range and too dangerous. Not to mention the risk of having them shot down on route. Not an issue when they're delivering biscuits and cans of Coke. But if they were delivering your average Amazon package that might be an iPhone or a graphics card they would become very tempting targets
For a small tech startup in drone, their objective is to cap in the endless cash in the capital market, the drone business work or not does not really matter, as long as they can sell the ideas to investor.
Snap
Yes, there are edge cases for drone delivery. For all of this, the hobbyist is being forced to add tracking devices to their RC planes and drones.
It is now 2050... We have drones from Amazon, Local Post office, A food delivery company, and, and... My package is dropped on my front lawn, yet when I get home @ 5 pm. it is no longer there. Yet Amazon has a picture of the drone delivery on my front lawn, so not their problem. Do I need to go on?
Imagine the sky full of those hellish wasps buzzing, and then it drops your food on dog poo.
Fuel powered drones could actually make sense for those remote area deliveries, especially if the hospitals have a dedicated landing/takeoff area
It cost me about $3 per battery to charge my hobby drone, and it falls below the 250gram ffa limit, I get 5 mins of flight on a good day. I'm like into hobby quad copter and they will never be viable for delivering anything... maybe a gas rail launched wings could be used but a quad is too inefficient in flight to be viable.
I have been building class 2 UAVs for the oast 5 years. The fact that amazon has poured billions into their program and need a 85lb vehicle to deliver a 5lb payload 14 miles round trip absolutely laughable. You can build a quad capable of flying 20 miles with that payload which weighs 20lbs. Amazon are a bunch of clowns. Drone delivery will never work but the vehicles they designed were an absolute disaster
Autonomous drone delivery. Everything wrong with flying cars combined with everything wrong with self-driving cars!
I lost it at the Russian maiden flight. Had to pause the video I was laughing so hard!
I'm from Helsinki area, and had not even heard of Wing having had a trial here. Vuosaari is an urban area, but it's also at the very easternmost tip of Helsinki away from any commercial aviation and such. I guess that the experiment is not ongoing right now as the info page on the website of the shopping centre they were operating from has been taken down.
Using drones to deliver is like using one car to deliver a single package in a very energy inefficient way. It’s why we use trucks instead of cars to deliver goods from a to b. Trucks could deliver multiple goods to multiple location at once
Weworkism! So much capital available for any idea no matter how unworkable as long as it is “tech”.
I see what you mean, but I would see "WeWorkism" more as: rebranding something extremely ordinary as something high tech and edgy.
Having a drone bring a packet of timtam cookies to your house is peak 1st world decadence.
Very informative. Now the question is how do ground based delivery robots compare ? I hope this shows the CEOs that it's better to hire people.
Idea: how about people dressed as robots?
Liability Lawyers are just salivating 😊
The long-range, high value / time critical niche is probably the best for drone delivery... but as it is very niche, it's not good for corporations.
There's actually a really successful drone delivery company called Zipline International Inc.
They deliver urgent medical blood supplies by drone and parachute to remote locations.
So it's horses for courses.
Sound like these Drones are trying to solve the issue that the USA sucks at building cities.
imagine being in war, you hear those drones
There are still companies testing the viability of drone deliveries of pharmaceutical's. You will never see drone deliveries in cities or built up areas due to most cities forbidding drone operations except under special operating permits on a flight by flight basis.
If we lived in the sky, "the ground" would be hyped as the next big thing in transportation technology.
Next time they will come with a cannon shooting packages to your doorstep. Delivery almost instant and with no noise. Announce it and your company will have 20B market cap overnight. Also mention it will be operated by AI and it will be 100B company.