this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
765 points (96.3% liked)

Technology

59588 readers
3375 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
L3s@fry.gs
L4s@fry.gs
L4s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
765
Amazon's drone delivery program is the joke it always sounded like. (news.yahoo.com)
submitted 1 year ago by FlyingSquid@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
206 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh more than 5 pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy.

You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn’t make off with your item or that it doesn’t roll into the street (which happened once to Lord and Silverman). But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees.

Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] perviouslyiner@lemm.ee 34 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Another more successful operation in Rwanda and Ghana is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_company) delivering 1.8kg over 300km and dropped by parachute.

[–] Diplomjodler@feddit.de 19 points 1 year ago

That works for special use cases in rural environments. They use drones for mail delivery on some German islands, for instance. As a mainstream delivery option in urban environments this is just laughably impractical and that has been very obvious from day one.

[–] ours@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

It's certainly more useful in locations with insufficient infrastructure.