Sooner or later, drones will start plying across aerial routes too for transportation of goods. That will be perhaps both cheaper for ebay/amazon and also leave the roads free for people to walk. What do you think?
I don't think the kind of truck they're aiming to automatise ever enter cities.
What kind of drones and what kind of goods are you talking about ? Let's say you want to transport 40T of potatoes over 2k miles, how would that work ?
Drones are good for the last few miles of the delivery (for small consumer goods), and even then there are tons of issues to fix before they'll be viable.
Depends. Uf you have solar panels, the electricity is more or less free after you buy and deploy them. So if you have some drone fleet and solar panels + batteries, the only real cost you have is basically maintenance. The way many businesses work, variable cost is what matters. So you'd lease the drones, the solar panels & batteries (or just get a cheap energy supplier) and focus on handling and transporting packages. Drones are interesting for that because you can save time by flying point to point, and cost by not having to employ drivers/pilots.
I don't think the kind of truck they're aiming to automatise ever enter cities.
What kind of drones and what kind of goods are you talking about ? Let's say you want to transport 40T of potatoes over 2k miles, how would that work ?
Drones are good for the last few miles of the delivery (for small consumer goods), and even then there are tons of issues to fix before they'll be viable.
https://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Indust...
> 11.49 billion tons of freight (primary shipments only) transported by trucks in 2018, representing 71.4% of total domestic tonnage shipped.