Wing Fast-Mile Delivery Report.pdf (storage.googleapis.com)
There is a place for drone deliveries but … there are a lot of places where there will not be drone deliveries, due to dense housing, power lines, trees, distance, too close to airports and heliports, and more. There will also likely, at some point, be autonomous surface robot deliveries (there are some experimental systems in dense cities now), but little of this makes sense for low value density deliverables.
The above link talks about people ordering “last minute” needs, and having groceries delivered by drone. While a cute scenario, I doubt this is what propels drone deliveries. You cannot ship a $3.50, 10-pound bag of potatoes, by drone air delivery, for a price that makes sustainable sense.
It becomes pets.com again – where shipping 40-pound bags of dog food was not a profitable and sustainable business. Shipping a bag of potatoes or a bottle of ketchup at the last minute is not going to pay the bills!
The market – for the next many years – is high value density items, such as prescription medications.
When I worked in industry I sometimes wrote early drafts or our company’s comments on government regulatory changes. It was standard practice to fill the comments with scenarios of why such changes would be good or bad. Rarely did these scenarios occur, as technology and markets eventually found their own successful outcomes. I mention this because having drone deliveries for last minute grocery items sounds just like those scenarios we would have made!
On the other hand, delivery makes sense for high value density items. Perhaps sometime in the distant future drone deliveries could make sense for lower value density, but that is a long time out, after volume efficiencies reduce costs of delivery.
I’d be happy if Amazon could deliver faster than 5-7 days (the 2-day delivery thing is only for people in major cities, as we’ve learned), or Walmart could deliver faster than 1-3 weeks! I don’t need 30-minute delivery.
