But that’s the thing, you would need to be within the drone’s operating range. I’m guessing they really couldn’t go 10 miles, and they have to get back. That means you need the inventory effectively walking distance from the customer. Amazon’s efficiency is because it has huge central warehouses next door to airports or other shipping centers.
I expect Seattle has a warehouse and probably a population density around it that could be serviced to maybe make it cost-effective. But that’s also assuming that there are are enough people who need a new pair of headphones, right now, and are willing to pay an enormous fee to have it coptered to their front door.
But, I agree that they must have some idea about its viability. Going through all the patent process, lobbying the FAA, news releases, etc. I haven’t really heard a side saying that it’s a really good idea, apart from sounding cool, especially on BB. I mean, Jeff Bezos isn’t infallible, and CEOs come up with crazy ideas all the time. Sure, you can talk about innovation and ‘nobody believed the airplane would work’, but we know how drones work, and that’s specifically why everyone thinks it’s just a bad idea.
Take your BB user here, everyone is tech savvy, likes novelty. I’m sure many would get a kick of having a helicopter bring them a bottle of shampoo, even willing to pay a premium for it. But that would be it, the cool factor would be gone, and no one would use it again.
Like everything else cyber, William Gibson got there first.
The heroes of Mona Lisa Overdrive save the day hacking a delivery a drone to drop refrigerators on encroaching thugs.
One possibility could be a hybrid system. A truck driver with 50 packages drives to the center of an area and parks there for 10 minutes while drones make the final delivery. You could save quite a bit on driver time and cost that way.
I would definitely order something once just to see what it’s like, but you’re right, the novelty factor would wear off quickly. Another potentially viable use case would be prescription delivery, if Amazon would partner with local pharmacies. That might hit the sweet spot of light weight, high value and the need for speedy delivery. Especially in the Seattle area, winter ice storms can paralyze ground traffic, so drones delivering needed medicines could be a really good thing.
That’s actually what I was thinking about as well!
CVS is everywhere, there is probably one within 10 miles of anyone.
However… A little drone carrying someone’s prescription of oxycontin would be an extremely good target 
You read it first on BoingBoing: some day, drones will be used to transport people.
It’s been a long time - I do not remember that scene at all!
You know, as I recall the auto and remote pilot systems on current commercial aircraft are already pretty advanced.
Safety regulations are probably the only thing stopping us from turning them into large people carrying drones.
Not so much, no, sorry…
Those devices transport multiple people. I mean a drone acting like a jetpack, taking one person to and fro. Not too high, more like a combination of Segway and autonomous car.
Those are completely different/wrong because the person is riding the drone, plus they’re quite large. I’m thinking drone hovers over you and drops harness then drags you off, or exoseleton with drone.
Now that French guy doing 207 mph on a bicycle is quite something.
Even if a drone that small could pack enough juice to lift around 80 kg (assuming a light passenger), hauling it through the air on rotor wings would be incredibly energy inefficient. Maybe you could hop really short distances if you could get the rotors to spin fast enough (helluva downdraft) and the battery to drain its charge quickly enough, but Mary Poppins would need a heck of an insurance plan. I don’t see jet pack sized passenger drones in the foreseeable future, but I’d love to be wrong. Can’t be any scarier than Uber.
We already have a hard enough time with creating anything close to a viable personal jetpack so I doubt we’ll be getting a drone version of one.
However I do think you’re on to something else. Autonomous Segways! They’ll be big!
San Francisco is approximately 7mi x 7mi, with a lot of steep hills, nowhere to park, and occasionally terrible traffic. I could see the drones being an economical choice here. I don’t know about a lot of other cities and non-urban locales, but SF seems doable.
There will be a new sport in America. “Drone Hunting.” Given that these things will likely fly too high for visual sighting until they near the destination, some new technology would be in order. Acquiring the parts and producing portable, perhaps radar?, devices that can detect drones will be highly sought after. Unless they would be plentiful and cheap, such a thing would be best served to those who will resist our fascist government’s drones… not just common thieves. Of course it would be a sport and even taking out delivery drones could serve the higher cause of ridding them from the skies as spies on our lives. Drones will have an ever growing presence as a tool for the Oligarchic, Totalitarian, World Rulers replacing our once democratic government to oppress and control the masses. They are already trying out new ways to label resistance, dissent, and “tattle-tails” as terrorists. More than just taking out drones will become a new, life or death sport around the world.
My bet is on passive radar network. Listeners using some SDR board, with precision time-tagging of the received signals, sharing the received events (e.g. comm packet headers) over the Net and correlating their time-of-arrival. And building a 3d map of the drone activity in the airspace. From that there is only a small step to a sentrygun, or a counterdrone drone.
Yet another way to take humans out of the equation that once was designed for humans. As the economic truths become more evident in spite of the “recovery” propaganda and the greater population heads more towards peasantry, who will they delivery to?
Not if this system is just for people who have ordered drones via Amazon.
No, really, there are tons of options of “how to lend the drone”. From funny ones throwing the rock if you are a good marksman to those dangerous with a gun. I really don’t see the point. Correct me if I’m wrong please…
Well, I guess it will deliver America’s delivery people to that point. Americans receiving deliveries wouldn’t really see much appreciable difference, would they?
