[raynr]

3. Drones, autonomous or not, aren't anywhere near reliable enough to do autonomous remote delivery. Final delivery is fraught with a myriad of things that can go wrong. GPS is not 100% reliable or accurate in urban areas. Failure in flight means both drone and package are lost, with the added bonus of potentially hurting or killing someone, liability for which the insurance company is not going to underwrite because drones aren't reliable. Backup flight modes add to weight and cost, and reduce deliverable payload. And even after all of that, aviation authorities at least in my jurisdiction are extremely conservative and won't approve them for autonomous delivery and flight near anywhere people live.

4. Payloads on flying things have severe weight and volume limitations. This limits what you can deliver to things that are small and light.

5. An autonomous drone represents an opportunity for theft or interference. See the drone coming, then: steal the goods when it delivers, interfere with its GPS and force it into an error mode that lands the drone, etc. You don't even need to be at the destination.

6. Multicopters, the devices most people think of when they think drones, have terrible range and payload capacity. The flight mode is akin to helicopters, "beat the air into submission". On the upside, they can hover on the spot. In contrast, plane-style drones which fly aerodynamically or "on the wing", have more range (being more efficient), but have difficulty landing on specific spots and then returning back to base. There are solutions around this, but not 100% viable in all cases. VTOL planes exist for instance, but they're finicky. Parachutes as a delivery mechanism also exist, but not everything can be delivered by dropping a payload.

And much more...

Air delivery exists in places where these aren't concerns and where the cost benefit analysis skews the other way. Zipline [0] has been doing a great job delivering blood to remote areas in Rwanda for a while now. Their product, payload, delivery method, geographical location, regulatory environment, all align to make it worth it. Watch some youtube videos of their operation, it's pretty neat.

[0] https://www.flyzipline.com/

[JeremyNT]

> 4. Payloads on flying things have severe weight and volume limitations. This limits what you can deliver to things that are small and light.

This point to me seems like such an obvious hard limit on how well this could ever work without some serious advancements in battery tech, and it's why the whole thing seemed like mostly snake oil to me.

The x-copters have very low weight limits (and low flight times when loaded) and realistically this wouldn't be possible for weights over ~10 pounds without very short range limitations and massive downtime for recharging (and/or truly massive drones, which would pose too much of a safety risk in populated areas).

Not to mention the physical shape of even many small / light objects would make stable flight difficult or impossible. The second the wind picks up, they are in serious trouble.

Maybe some small and very specific niches can utilize it, but I suspect in almost all cases (even when it is possible to use these things optimally) driving is actually going to be cheaper overall.

[JohnFen]

This (as well as range) depends on what size and cost you can accept. You can absolutely get drones that can carry useful loads and/or that have long ranges, but they're large and very expensive.

[jollyllama]

This. The tech was never there, the hype came from people who didn't understand the fundamental problem, and the secondary stuff about regs and people not having landing zones is cope to disguise yet another failure on the part of the hype zombies.