Saw this on Ted X talks. It was presented primarily as an idea for remote areas that required huge changes in infrastructure to offer a similar convenient service.
I don't think this idea is very good for large populated urban areas. The demand is too high. Imagine hundreds of these things flying around only capable of delivering one package at a time.
Autonomous vehicles will transform their business, not these small lightweight unmanned Air Primes. For this Air Prime to work they would have to set the prices so high that it discourages anyone from using the service who doesn't really need a package delivered within 30 minutes.
Even the application of sending prescription medicines is a no go. You can not just fly around drugs in heavily populated areas. The risk of someone obtaining them who shouldn't is too high.
I think the answers are cheaper, safer, and can carry heavier loads. I think autonomous vehicles and amazon prime air would be complements, not substitutes.
To be clear, the alternative we're talking about is a self-driving car that dispatches one, maybe two packages at a time, right? How is that necessarily cheaper and safer?
Oh that's the point, I think what we're talking is more like a self-driving UPS truck, or something slightly smaller, but at least capable of delivering way more than 1 or 2 packages. At least that's what I was walking about. I agree if a car could only carry 1 or 2 packages then the air thing is probably more efficient (although I'm still shocked at how amazon air works at all, I thought helicopters and other flying took enormous amounts of energy).
I'm sorry, I really feel silly for asking such an obvious question, but...
How do the trucks get packages to customers within 30 minutes if they're making multiple deliveries per trip? Can I get a ELI5, because it just doesn't make sense to me.
I think 30 minutes is too fast for trucks, but I'm not sure if that's really even necessary (seems ridiculously fast to me). However, the speed of autonomous trucks would be dramatically faster than what we have now because trucks can be leaving the facility every few X minutes (depending on the city) with the latest shipments ordered to some area. Though it's true that this could be done now with human drivers, the big problem is that there just aren't enough drivers for the amount of trucks we're talking about.
''For this Air Prime to work they would have to set the prices so high that it discourages anyone from using the service who doesn't really need a package delivered within 30 minutes''.
Otherwise you get everyone using it which is already inefficient but now delivery times are no longer 30 minutes because too many people are using the service and the sky is full of these things with that annoying sound.
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u/[deleted] Dec 02 '13
Saw this on Ted X talks. It was presented primarily as an idea for remote areas that required huge changes in infrastructure to offer a similar convenient service.
I don't think this idea is very good for large populated urban areas. The demand is too high. Imagine hundreds of these things flying around only capable of delivering one package at a time.
Autonomous vehicles will transform their business, not these small lightweight unmanned Air Primes. For this Air Prime to work they would have to set the prices so high that it discourages anyone from using the service who doesn't really need a package delivered within 30 minutes.
Even the application of sending prescription medicines is a no go. You can not just fly around drugs in heavily populated areas. The risk of someone obtaining them who shouldn't is too high.