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Comment by alooPotato | Hacker News Reader

I'm really curious how this beats a amazon owned delivery truck? Serious question.

Economically and at scale, it seems like both the truck and drone are actually pretty cheap.

Speed of delivery and at scale, the only way the drone is faster is if there is a warehouse in each city and your item is stocked. Otherwise, the bottleneck in delivery time is the long distance shipping.

Feasibility and at scale, the truck seems way less risky and more adaptable to bad conditions.

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Often going 5 miles in a city can take 30+ minutes. So using drones makes this easier. Further per package delivery costs are probably lower. At day 10,000$ per drone, an average deliver 8 packages a day, for 3 years. That's 1.25$ per package.

To be economical, the truck would have to be relatively full, which means dozens of dropoffs, which means the average delivery time is measured in hours, not minutes. With a whole bunch of drones, you can do all those deliveries in parallel.

I don't think this will be everywhere, just urban -- at least a t first. My guess is they'll also use PrimeNow (1, 2, 4 hour delivery by car/truck from a localized warehouse -- happening NOW in my city) as a canary in a coal mine to test a given market's suitability to immediate delivery (in terms of demand, regulatory env, probably tons of other factors).

With automated drones and Amazon brick and mortar stores the idea of large warehouses could be challenged. They could shift packages in an automated fashion to areas with more probable demand. Drones are crazy cheap as well. I can imagine hundreds of these in the sky at once in Chicago if not thousands.

>I can imagine hundreds of these in the sky at once in Chicago if not thousands.

Which sounds like an utterly horrifying scenario. It's not so much that I can't imagine this sort of delivery not working in some scenarios as that I have a lot of trouble imagining it working at scale.

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