The actual harm from the drone's wasted energy is pretty negligible aside from the waste heat itself, though, as compared to the many, many side effects of road vehicles of any kind (for example, just starting with the air pollution from tire particles).

Of course, that equation changes a bit once there are enough drones that noise pollution and collisions or other incidents become a real issue.

Noise pollution and collisions are a much, much larger problem with cars, since they're constrained to two dimensions while drones can use three. Plus, cars tend to kill people when they collide with each other (or with pedestrians), and drones would not. Hopefully they will all use engineered quiet propellers (such as Zipline uses) and electric engines (similarly).

> Plus, cars tend to kill people... and drones would not.

I think this is an good move by the FAA, but I also think that if one of these airplanes flew right into my head at full speed, I'd die.

People are ingenious at getting killed, and birds can do it so eventually if we have enough drones someone will die to one.

However, much mini deliveries could be done with vehicles smaller than a full size car - and places where it is common you see lots of mopeds and similar.

People still can die to them.

It seems like a drone falling out of the sky could still kill people. It just seems less likely to us because there aren't as many right now to worry about like cars.

I like these devices for use for medical supplies but do worry how polluted the skies could become when multiple companies are flying these things for standard packages.

Aircraft are more energy efficient then cars[1] at scale. But even a light plane like a Cessna 172 does 13L/100KM[2] depending on flight speed. Certainly more then my Prius, but it can take a much more direct route too.

There's also the simple practical issue: self-driving cars can't navigate a complex crowded environment, whereas self-flying planes navigate a much simpler environment with many more regulatory controls on behavior.

[1] https://www.sustainablebusiness.com/2014/02/surprisingly-air...

[2] https://www.flyouts.com/vliegtuig/cessna-172

If Prius was adapted to run optimally on extremely high octane leaded fuel what could it get?

The Prius doesn’t fly, so let’s not repeat the leaded fuel mistake.

High octane does NOT increase total available power, in fact it reduces it.

It enables higher compression so you can get more power per unit of engine weight, but the fuel efficiency per gallon is lower.

And the lead is for the valves.

You can get more efficient planes but you can’t overcome the need to fight gravity at some point.

I thought higher octane improved efficiency by avoiding premature combustion, but that may have only been relevant before electronic fuel injection.

> Aircraft are more energy efficient then cars[1] at scale.

Some aircraft and definitely not drons for now.

zipline's "platform 1" is an airplane, and "platform 2" is a quadcopter shaped like an airplane. https://www.flyzipline.com/technology

So they should have much better efficiency than typical quadcopters

Depends on perspective. You could say it's a glider with a quadcopter bolted underneath for VTOL capabilities.

What is a drone to you? If you are only thinking about multicopters when you hear that word then yes, those are not efficient and probably never will be.

But the term commonly refers to all unmanned aerial vehicles.

For example a Global Hawk unmanned aircraft can fly 14,000 nautical miles and remain aloft for 42 hours. They are by definition very efficient. That is a drone.

On the other end of the spectrum The Spirit of Butts' Farm crossed the atlantic with 118 US fluid ounces (3.5 L) of fuel. It was flying for ~39 hour and 1,881.6 mi (3,028.1 km). That is about 2045 mile per gallon if I count it right. That is very efficient, and of course since the aircraft was unmanned it is a drone.

These are representative of the kinds of drones and aircraft relevant to the context of this post?

Moreso than the quadcopter you probably have in mind.

> For example a Global Hawk unmanned aircraft can fly 14,000 nautical miles and remain aloft for 42 hours. They are by definition very efficient. That is a drone.

Wow - this is what they are planning to use to deliver packages?

If so, unit economics will never work, regardless of cargo.

They use fixed wing aircraft, yes.

Do not want what global hawk is delivering

I lost confidence at the very beginning of the article:

> In fact, unless you drive a car that gets 33.8 gallons per mile (or carry more than one passenger), new airplanes coming off the assembly line are more fuel-efficient

Cars typically get about 0.03 gallons per mile, so it’s not even close.

OK, what about if our supermarkets are actually really tall buildings, and the drones glide down from the distribution platform on the top floor...

That sounds pretty much the same as existing "catolog stores"[0] like Argos[1] (although your idea is probably a bit more automated).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalog_merchant

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argos_(retailer)

Ideally you'd use little remote controlled electric cars, but driving on the ground is a MUCH more complex problem.

With a sufficient number of drones in the air simultaneously, this becomes a far more difficult problem.

Only if you assume there is no regulator or shared protocol.

Anyway, most people will not want a sky full of drones just so that some random Joes can get their stuff from Amazon or AliExpress a little sooner.

I imagine people felt the same way when cars were popularised, but we‘ll get used to the convenience

This time it's different because we know where it might lead to.

If the skies fill with drones while traffic jams ease, there’s less double parking for delivery, and streets generally start looking more airy, people may make the association.

That's not going to happen. Check out "induced demand".

Otherwise as selling dollara for dimes. At least in the last VC bavked iteration of it.

Historically speaking, tech is relatively unregulated and protocols are all over the place. I'd say it's a safe assumption.

Birds are pretty dumb on average, and handle it really well.

Birds are not that dumb and compared to drones they're Einstein.

Specialized in flying, including eyes and brains, at that!

Autopiloted is much easier than cars because air space is less crowded with less obstacles and extremely well controlled. Low flying delivery drones don't fall in that bucket.

Less crowded now. But if they take over all those deliveries that are going on now the sky will get quite crowded and I suspect we will see people asking for no fly zones and for drones to be constrained to fly along roads instead of low over people's gardens. I certainly don't want hundreds of drones flying over my garden every day. Something like 35 million people in the UK buy something online every week, that would be a lot of drones. If you imagine that there is a distribution centre for every 50 000 people in the UK, that's roughly 1 500 distribution centres each with over 3 000 drone flights per day.

I realize that this is a very rough calculation and that of course there would be large variations in flight frequency but no one else seems to be showing anything better.

I don't think I would want to live near one.

With thousands of drones crossing the city sky, there would have to be some kind of system to organize that traffic, both to minimize collisions and sound pollution.

It's not hard to imagine how systems like that could be organized.

It's also important to consider how many road vehicle trips this would replace.

I don't care how it is organized, I just don't want them all flying over me. Living near such a distribution centre would be like living next to an airport unless there are regulations enforced that they ascend vertically so high that they cannot be heard.

How many road trips would it replace? Drones capable of carrying a 5 kg payload over any distance are fairly big. The DJI Matrice 600 Pro for instance weighs 15 kg and is over a metre across. It has a hover time of only 18 minutes. Maximum speed is 65 kph so its round trip range is about 20 km.

A small electric van can easily carry a hundred such packages and has an empty weight of roughly one hundred times that of the drone.

Presumably the drones used for deliveries would have to be much more robust and have much longer ranges, both of which would make them heavier.

So 100 drones replace one van.

I'm sure there are huge holes in my analysis perhaps, you can improve it so that it shows that a substantial number of road trips would be replaced without filling the sky with drones.

Birds aren't real. Google it, "do your own research"!

Big sky theory falls apart near airports already, and a crowded drone filled sky would have issues especially with unexpected weather.

Only on places where they concentrate. It's not really flying that is difficult, it's approach and take-off, because they have to go through all of the heights.

The existence of migratory birds proves that the loss of energy due to the Earth's gravitational pull is not so catastrophic. A vehicle in motion also loses energy because of the friction of the wheels. Above a certain speed, air friction becomes the most significant loss. The comparison of the energy balance of a vehicle on the road compared with a vehicle in the air is not as clear-cut. Vehicles on wheels are much heavier and require infrastructure (roads) that must be taken into account.

You may have noticed that migratory birds have a somewhat different mechanism of flight than typical drones.

zipline has wings

They do show that: https://www.flyzipline.com/technology (scroll down, it first shows the thing that it drops, rather than the drone itself.)

Lots of CGI and notices about "simulated" though. The videos that appear to maybe be real show something that does have wings, but looks too small/light/thin to carry much around.

The ones they are currently using in Africa are normal drone planes. They drop their payload without stopping though, so the payload has to be packed securely and nothing that can break easily. So it's used for medical supplies. This what Mark Rober's video was about.

If they were to create a drone that can deliver arbitrary packages, then it needs to be able to lower a package safely. That's what those renders are, they show a typical multi-rotar drone with small wings. So it can stop and lower a package. I don't think there's any real footage of these yet.

He shows the proposed new model in that video too though, not just the drone planes.

The concept of a fixed-wing VTOL UAS is well-tested, though. They’re not as simple as a quad or a “native” fixed-wing, but well within reach of a motivated hobbyist.

Came here to say that (i think their operations in Africa are quite impressive) but it seems as their "Zips" are a different kind of breed and more like a drone than a plane.

If you were to ask a migratory bird, they'd tell you that it's fairly tough. You have to put on enough subcutaneous fat to double your body weight, and then do it knowing that either you or some of your friends and family will die.

Also, with global warming and stuff, if possible those birds migrate less.

There is no evidence to support this statement.

Plenty ofnevidence, of e.g. geese, migrating tonplaces further north. But surey birds don't exist anyway.

Please provide your sources for the effect of climate change on bird migration.

Here's one of many: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3201/climate-patterns-thousand...

'may in the future ' basically...

I'm sorry if it wasn't clear, but I was asking for sources on GP's claim that climate change has shifted the north-south spatial location of birds' migration destinations.

The research you linked to doesn't seem to be saying that; it's claims are about the influence of interannual climate variation on timing of migration IIUC.

-- https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/103/2/BAMS-D...

Abstract For ∼100 years, the continental patterns of avian migration in North America have been described in the context of three or four primary flyways. This spatial compartmentalization often fails to adequately reflect a critical characterization of migration—phenology. This shortcoming has been partly due to the lack of reliable continental-scale data, a gap filled by our current study. Here, we leveraged unique radar-based data quantifying migration phenology and used an objective regionalization approach to introduce a new spatial framework that reflects interannual variability. Therefore, the resulting spatial classification is intrinsically different from the “flyway concept.” We identified two regions with distinct interannual variability of spring migration across the contiguous United States. This data-driven framework enabled us to explore the climatic cues affecting the interannual variability of migration phenology, “specific to each region” across North America. For example, our “two-region” approach allowed us to identify an east–west dipole pattern in migratory behavior linked to atmospheric Rossby waves. Also, we revealed that migration movements over the western United States were inversely related to interannual and low-frequency variability of regional temperature. A similar link, but weaker and only for interannual variability, was evident for the eastern region. However, this region was more strongly tied to climate teleconnections, particularly to the east Pacific–North Pacific (EP–NP) pattern. The results suggest that oceanic forcing in the tropical Pacific—through a chain of processes including Rossby wave trains—controls the climatic conditions, associated with bird migration over the eastern United States. Our spatial platform would facilitate better understanding of the mechanisms responsible for broadscale migration phenology and its potential future changes.

Yes, but how does the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow compare to that of one delivering a coconut?

Where I live we can get deliveries by starships https://www.starship.xyz/. The vehicles are kind of cute when you see them in action.

They do look cute, I remember being completely taken-aback the first time I saw one in the wild - I had to resist the temptation to stand in front of it, to see what would happen.

Though I did wonder how they'll cope in winter-weather. I can't imagine they'd do so well on snow/ice.

But there are plenty of places that don't have much snow and ice where they should be perfectly practical. Ice shouldn't be a problem, they could swap to studded tyres in the winter just like we do for cars here in Norway. Snow would be a much bigger problem though I agree!

I'd encourage you to stand in front of it. Commercializing public walkways like this is fine, I guess, but as a human walking around for non-commercial reasons, I feel like you have the right to do whatever you want (within reason) that doesn't impact other humans.

Ok that seems like far more practical idea

They seem practical until you realize how easy it is to steal one.

The starships on the road are free you can just take them I have 458 starships.

Those wheels look moderately impractical- larger wheels might have more clearance.

Reminds me that we had pneumatic tubes and miniature railways between buildings a century ago.

They've been working on those things in Tallinn for years, and I've only ever seen them operate in a very limited area, and even then it's not unusual to see them seemingly stuck at the nearby rail crossing. Meanwhile a human on a Bolt scooter ate their and their investor's lunch IMO.

They've been using them in Milton Keynes too: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/12/robots-deliv...

Also DPD piloted something similar in Milton Keynes and is now going to do it i ten towns in the UK: https://green.dpd.co.uk/news/16

In a crime-free utopia, they could be useful. Or maybe within a large corporate campus type environment.

But 'on the streets' in the real world, they're just targets for vandalism and theft.

Couldn't that be said about humans? As I understand it, once upon a time in some parts of the world, walking alone unarmed could get you abducted and sold into slavery. But then we decided as a society that we want to have this "Human Rights" thing and now most of us feel relatively safe about other people on the street not randomly abducting or assaulting us.

So I'm just not getting the argument for why we can't trust humans to not vandalize or steal robots, especially internet-connected ones that constantly film their surroundings. I for one believe that just like we can learn to be civil to one another, and can also extend our civility to other species (e.g. we generally don't go around kicking dogs we see on the street), we can also be civil to robots.

It depends.

Somewhere like Japan, with a strong cultural sense of societal cohesion and obligation, it could work.

But I live in a country where "societal cohesion" and "obligations" are considered communist propaganda and our constitution gives us the right to as many guns as we want in case we decide to hunt the government for sport.

I mean, this robot[0] make it all the way across the Netherlands and Germany, and only 300 miles into the US before getting beheaded.

[0]https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/us/hitchbot-robot-beheaded-ph...

They are already in use in the UK.

Those look perfect for campus delivery applications.

Sure but there's a tradeoff with ground transport. A drone can make the trip with much shorter traveled distance and potentially higher speed, resulting in higher utilization per vehicle. It also doesn't interfere with road traffic, which could have externalities in longer idle time for other vehicles at intersections and whatnot.

Both are better than Garret in his 2007 Ford Explorer driving around town all day delivering timbits and tacos.

> resulting in higher utilization per vehicle

A van can hold thousands of 2-ounce packages, whereas a drone can hold one. If you look at it in terms of a one-package utilization rate, a van has over 100% rate, because it holds multiple packages, in fact it may have over a 1000% utilization rate using that metric.

You're essentially wasting tons of energy and resources getting very small packages delivered faster, but in urban setting there are no efficiencies here, quite the contrary.

Clear example: Hospitals have helicopters, but most patients are still moved using vans. The helicopter is faster (when patient's life is acutely ending), but prohibitively expensive to utilize for every patient.

That example doesn't quite hold up. A helicopter is roughly the same size and weight as an ambulance and needs to transport a whole bunch of equipment. If we could get a Zipline drone to drive on the street, it would be vastly more efficient than its airborne brethren, but our infrastructure isn't set up for that.

It's also a lot more dangerous, both for the patient and the flight crew. It takes a pretty critical need to offset that.

I've long thought there's potential in using drones to transport drugs and light equipment to hospitals. Crewed helicopters are expensive and risky, but the stakes are lower when your drone is only carrying a few thousand dollars of a drug that's rare enough it's not worth stocking.

Here's a thought: vehicles that are already scheduled (uber or robot-taxies) are already scheduled from point A to point B. Drone scheduling could piggyback on this such that as large vehicle passes restaurant R at A', a drone from R lands and disgorges your sandwich into a locker mounted on a landing pad on top of the taxi. (hand waves - that's just a mechanical problem, can't be worse than what a fast food place is doing.) As the ground vehicle approaches B, a new drone (or the same drone, if it was just hitching) could finish the delivery to your home H at B'.

Obviously it would take a lot longer than a direct flight, but the energy consumed would be far less.

Or, people should just make a sandwich.

A network of "wardriving" drones that use semi-trucks and box trucks as charging hubs while in transit is the next innovation of short distance delivery.

This is why I don't feel bad ordering smaller items from Amazon when I could drive across town and get it myself.

But Uber eats and DoorDash are a reality, and I would pay someone to pick something up for me from Home Depot within the next hour. Services like Zipline have the potential to help out there.

>This is why I don't feel bad ordering smaller items from Amazon when I could drive across town and get it myself.

I've long thought this. UPS isn't driving from the hub to my house to deliver a package, 90% of the incremental driving distance is the length of my driveway.

>>A van can hold thousands of 2-ounce packages, whereas a drone can hold one.

In a perfect world, yes. In reality, no. You would need a perfect storm of a huge wave of orders all to the same restaurant (or cluster of restaurants) to be delivered to the same neighborhood to ensure timely delivery so the food was hot and the customers were happy. In real life, you are almost guaranteed to never hit the ideal conditions.

Edit: After re-reading your comment, I’d agree with you for the non-food deliveries. My comment was obviously focused more on the UberEats use case.

I just hope my DoorDash order is not sandwich #9,836...

A locomotive would be even more efficient over long distances, carrying 200,000,000 such packages. A containership even more so, carrying more than 20x the capacity of a big freight train, though I don't think they have the draft to fit up the drainage ditch behind my house. Nor do I have rails.

I jest, but the long tail is a real problem with such efficiency calculations.

You're right that it's never going to make sense to have migrating swarms of drones flying above the interstate carrying packages cross-country, but are real efficiencies here at the individual level:

https://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/4b8da4bb-42c2-4b91-baf2-...

Graphic from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2022.100569.

That's why I exclusively order my food delivery via container ship!

You've got the answer, but just to point the problem with your comment from another point of view...

No, last mile delivery is made package by package. If you place 100 packages in a van and go delivering them, you will make 100 mostly independent trips, just carrying all the packages at once.

That's why those are very often done by motorcycle.

But indeed there is often a highly correlated trip segment. The Amazon's model of running a van into your neighborhood and distributing things there by drones may make sense. It doesn't make sense for Uber Eats business model, but it makes sense for Amazon.

Garret’ll get there in a hurricane though

I was raised to consider ordering takeout in truly awful weather as pretty rude.

I realize that has good intentions, but it's actually terrible advice.

Delivery drivers are paid basically solely with your tips.

If you don't order, they don't make any money that day.

If you want to be nice, order that delivery, but tip more.

Bad weather is actually their favorite because people tip more.

There might be different ideas of what makes “bad” weather.

Some Californians think that any weather at all is bad, and some midwesterners think “there’s no such thing as bad weather, only wrong clothing”.

I wouldn’t hesitate to order delivery if it were raining or snowing, but maybe in this world there are people who would still order delivery during a tornado warning (because that way they don’t have to risk driving during a tornado).

The responsibility is not on you as a consumer.

If it's genuinely life-threatening out, an actual tornado warning, then nobody's delivering in the first place. You can't order delivery even if you want.

It's up to the business and driver (or mayor ordering all non-essential vehicles off the road). Not you.

> I was raised to consider ordering takeout in truly awful weather as pretty rude.

What’s more rude? Ordering takeout in bad weather, or not ordering takeout and indirectly punishing the delivery driver’s livelihood whenever the weather is bad..?

Timbits and Tacos sounds like an amazing D&D parody.

Bikes for local rapid delivery are hard to beat.

Drones schmones.

Miniature zeppelins is where it’s at. Bouyancy to just below negative so very little energy needed to lift the device.

It is still a trade-off - you end up fighting drag, potentially for much longer than a regular drone.

There are other things you need energy for. Such as overcoming wind and rain.

It's been studied; drones are somewhat better: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02411-5

E-bike courriers are probably better still but drones are probably faster if you can make them work.

A lot depends on the delivery pattern, of course.

Nice thing about drones is they're unlikely to kill anyone if they crash, and they're not sharing the roads with cars in the first place.

In some places, bikes are first-class citizens of the road, but in other places they're very much not respected and riding one is tantamount to suicide. Every single cyclist I know, when they meet another cyclist, immediately asks about gnarliest injuries and they compare scars like dogs sniffing each other's butts. And in the past 20 years I've lost more friends to cycling fatalities than any other cause of death.

I'll take the drones, thankyouverymuch.