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Comment by mb_72 | Hacker News Reader

Starship Technologies has been going at this for ~5 years already, and I feel extremely skeptical about this entire 'autonomous last mile delivery' thing. Home delivery is a solved problem; we pay a few EUR for it and a human turns up in their car, plus there's no need to have a valuable 10k EUR robot delivering a 5EUR pizza. For packages, there's three different package locker systems within 10 minutes walk of our house. To access any robot we'd need to go to the front of our apartment building anyway.

I guess I must really be missing the point of all this, as a bunch of people seem to want to throw a lot of money and effort at the 'problem'.

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No offense, but yes you are missing the point. The whole value of autonomous taxis or autonomous delivery robots is that it eliminates the most expensive thing about the business model of Uber/Lyft/Instacart/etc: labor.

Once you create a taxi or delivery service where you have no labor cost, then your unit economics greatly improve and you have a killer business.

If you have a $10 Uber ride, ~$7.50 or so of that goes to the driver with $2.50 to Uber. With an autonomous taxi model Uber could theoretically halve fares, in this case to $5, and take in the entire $5 for themselves.

Please try and convince me that someone operating a fleet of delivery robots that costs many thousands of euros each is going to be 'cheaper' than utilising the current model of people + their own cars. Where I live (Estonia), delivery adds a few euros to the cost of food (for example). Even if that was reduced to a single euro that wouldn't make any difference to if we ordered food to home or not.

That $7.50 pays to cover capital costs (the car). Uber would have to also pay for that out of their share.

The general point is that the savings might not be enough to offset the higher capital costs from autonomous vehicles + development spend.

I don't think you get it. For big companies like amazon they realize that the key to competing against traditional retail is to get the package to the customer as fast as possible. The faster the better. Amazon already has same day delivery but just imagine if there was a service that provided you the item within 60 minutes....and even better yet just imagine if during non-peak hours this service was even free? That's the direction we are going.

All these items would need to be in stock somewhere locally for delivery to be that fast, and if they are I'll either go and get them myself or pay 3-4 euros to have them delivered to a parcel locker 5 minutes away tomorrow. I'm fairly impatient, and there's nothing I actually need 'today'.

Where I live the streets are covered with snow and ice, and many paths and routes are difficult to navigate even on foot. No delivery vehicle is going to cope with this.

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