Audi and Amazon to try car-boot delivery service
bbc.com
bbc.com
Reading the title, I thought they might be doing something genuinely interesting, by subsidising the cost of the car so long as you have a space in it which Amazon had access to which can be used for ferrying goods from X to Y based on your normal travel patterns. i.e. using personal vehicles as deadhead capacity, effectively.
Edit: Further thought. What if they're about to deliver to your car, having found it from the GPS beacon, and you decide to drive somewhere. Are they going to chase you down the autobahn, waving frantically at you?! How will they manage delivery schedules?
I can't help but think that this is a logistics nightmare.
Edit: Further further thought. What if they can't fit it in your trunk? What if you park backed up to a wall?
You'll probably get an email/text and would be able to pick it up at a nearby DHL store. Probably the same as if they are not able to deliver a package to your home.
In some ways, it's also like international drug running - identify users that work in the USA and live in Canada, break into their cars, and leave illegal materials there. Then your counterpart will break into their cars while they're working, and retrieve the illegal materials.
You're exactly right that "incidental driving" would be a complicating exception. But I cling to the delusional belief that all exceptions can be handled. :)
Trunk fit can easily be checked in advance, too. They know the dimensions of your trunk and the dimensions of the package, and all they have to do is check the two and only allow this service if the one is smaller than the other.
The point of this scheme is to make that happen less, and also that people don't have to stay home waiting for the truck to come by as much.
Appears to be the trunk?
This service, on the other hand, seems completely reasonable. It's easy to implement with mostly existing infrastructure. The delivery trucks and drivers are already out there, GPS-enabled connected cars are already out there, all that's needed is something that lets the delivery driver talk to the car. This could be something as simple as a QR code on the package that opens a URL that shows the car's location and has a button for opening the trunk. It's a service that's actually useful: getting packages when you work all day is an ongoing problem for a lot of people.
A brief aside: "next day delivery" is hardly an innovation of Amazon. I remember catalogs in the late 80s or early 90s which prominently advertised "same day" service if you called in your order by, say, 3AM.
Keep in mind that it took >5 years for Prime and AWS to take off. When they first launched, they lacked many features and no one gave a second look at them.
Using car boots for delivery might not work with a single manufacturer, but it might work for all manufacturers. It might also work more effectively with driverless cars. Either way it's an experiment to push the boundaries of what can make their supply chain more efficient.
Believe it or not they do that at GoDaddy too.
I think it was mostly a liability / strategy decision rather than a cost one, but you can imagine people calling up and begging OnStar to start a subscription when they need it and then cancelling immediately after. Or trying to subscribe if their car was stolen to track it down..
But seriously, which kind of person believes this is a good idea? It is obvious, that Amazon needs to track the vehicle until delivery ( with a system that may or may not be switched off, if not needed) and DHL needs a system to unlock the car. This is not a hard to explain security hole in a server that is invisible for the average person. It is granting physical access to your car to a total stranger. What could possibly go wrong?
How about being able to use your boot as anyone's dropoff point? Say you've got the car somewhere and someone needs their stuff delivered. They come by, hit an app for authentication, your boot opens, they take their stuff.
Lots of issues, but why not?
This works great in an ideal situation, but there's lots of room for bad things to happen.
What about "AirBnB for package delivery." I don't have this problem (UPS will leave stuff at my house if no one is home: they'll even put stuff inside one of the vehicles if it's raining or snowing), but it strikes me that "renting" out your house for the express purpose of letting UPS/FedEx/whatever drop off a package for someone who can't get packages delivered during the day might be a useful service.
Probably can't charge much per package, but if you're OK with random people showing up at your house to get packages, it might be a useful service.
And on another note, I just saw the first TV commercial for AirBnB. How long have those been running?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
(See also: https://web.archive.org/web/20131221065154/https://www.buffe...)
In the '/whatever drop off a package for someone' market, I guess you can charge quite a lot, as 'whatever' will often drop of things that aren't 100% legal.
A service like that would need (self)-regulation, just as, for example, eBay and AirBnB developed after some initial bad press due to bad experiences of their buyers, respectively landlords.
So I think people are responding to you in terms of a viable service, where there is not much reason to distrust the delivery person.
For those who don't know: a Abstellvertrag handles the actions that need to be taken by the deliverer if nobody is home. For example, our postman delivers our packages at home into our garage.
Also, way to totally brush off the bigger news that the FAA's approved testing of Amazon's drone delivery :)
They're probably both about the same?
They usually call a monitoring centre, who then call the police, who then take a note that they were called, sit back, and have another cup of tea.
To actually get any kind of police response, you have to have a specially certified alarm system, and there have to be multiple sensors triggered... and even then, they'll take a note that they were called, sit back, and have another cup of tea.
See the recent Hatton Garden raid as a case in point.
Better than what happened to a friend of mine though. Her dad was a well-known doctor in a small town and let them use his house while he was on vacation. She couldn't remember the code when the alarm went off, so multiple cop cars showed up surrounding the house, police with drawn guns, etc. (he had notified them he was leaving on vacation) coming inside to arrest her and husband until she was able to convince them that she was his daughter and allowed to be there.
"Normal houses" very rarely have alarm systems here.
I guess I remember a friend's parent that had an alarm system, which oddly was one of the few houses I know of that was broken in to. I think the burglar cut the alarm wire on entry and got a bunch of stuff.
I imagine that this is more for people who park in a corporate, gated car park 5 days a week and want to get Amazon deliveries without taking a day off. My work used to take in small parcels when I worked in an office; the car-park was secure, gated with CCTV and I'd have had no problem using such a system which would require me to be on call to receive the delivery.
Personally I think lock-boxes in secure locations are probably better but there's perhaps more problems with personal security then - someone waits at the location and mugs you when you're picking up the parcel (that's not going to be so easy in an office car park).
When I lived in the city, UPS made me drive out to their depot in the suburbs to pick up a cheap white box PC because they wouldn't leave it with no one to sign for it.
However, they had no problem leaving my $900 Karastan rug propped up against the front door where it could get rained on/stolen, etc...