[BWStearns]

A ton of companies wanted to basically do intracity delivery but with with drones. It’s crazy hard airspace, hard from a technical standpoint wrt obstacle avoidance, and ultimately you’re competing against going downstairs and getting your own toothpaste. There’s not a ton of margin.

There were also a lot of efforts at more rural delivery schemes but mostly they’re working with quadcopter or hybrid designs which requires a ton of mass being dedicated to power. This restricts your flight time to about 30min and payload to a couple pounds (with some trade off function allowing more or less of one or the other). Even without regulation this means your delivery radius is on the order of a couple miles which means you’re competing against getting in the car or waiting a day.

I think the drone delivery concept is (without magic batteries) DOA if you’re talking about electric powered drones to areas that already have good 0-2 day options to get the thing you’re talking about delivering.

Using gas powered autonomous drones to deliver large payloads to remote areas with decent landing spots seems viable. I’m working on an air to ground glider drone prototype that can maybe be useful for “too far/logistically difficult for fast ground delivery but doesn’t have a prepared strip” but that requires being dropped from an aircraft so it needs to be worth the fractional cost of the flight etc.

Tl;dr: The power required to fly things, battery power density, and the geographical distribution of demand for delivery don’t seem to love each other.