[Retric]

Delivery vehicles for packages aren’t traveling very far between stops. A 2 ton vehicle dropping off 200 packages on a 100 mile delivery route is averaging 0.5 miles per package and 0.125 kWh where a drone might need to fly 15 miles each way per packages = 30 miles to and from some central hub to do those same routes. Drones are light, but 0.125 kWh to fly 30 miles seems unlikely.

Food delivery might be a better comparison, but 2 pizzas and a 2 liter soda is heavy enough to need a fairly massive drone.

[moffkalast]

The drone would still be the better option. Electric motors and propellers don't produce any pollution, unlike combustion engines and/or car tyres.

And of course the obvious part where it removes hundreds of thousands of vans from already massively congested road traffic. The skies remain mostly unused.

[Retric]

Drones aren’t necessarily electric, and cars can be EV so that doesn’t favor one over the other.

Pollution wise you need to consider the lifecycle of a drone which is likely far worse than a van. Many drones are using very dirty small internal combustion engines. Safety wise replacing 1 van with 30+ heavy drones each traveling far more could easily favor the van.

[moffkalast]

Any solution that isn't a stopgap is necessarily electric given climate change, and while EVs do reduce CO2 emissions they increase particle emissions from heavy tyre use by 20% (given their massive weight), which is arguably even worse for residential use. Anything that is in contact with the ground will produce some kind of particle pollution.

[Retric]

The extremely limited flight times and weather conditions you get from electric drones means large scale drone deployments will likely require small internal combustion engines and all the associated pollution from that. Some hybrid approaches where a land vehicle uses fully electric drones for drop off have been prototyped, but they don’t reduce tire ware.

Longer term it’s more debatable but we hand waving delivery drones as completely pollution free when we don’t know what from they would actually take is simply wishful thinking.

[moffkalast]

To be clear I'm talking about zipline's specifically designed delivery VTOLs, not your average consumer quadrotor. I wouldn't call over an hour and a half an "extremely limited flight time" and 50 miles is enough of a delivery range to make it operable from whichever restaurant/warehouse is making the delivery. And that's just today's tech.

[Retric]

Ok, I see your confusion.

Zipline 2 has a 10 mile range and is VTOL though they’re aiming for a long wire for delivery rather than landing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipline_(drone_delivery_compan...

Zipline 1 does have an 50 mile range but it isn’t VTOL they use fixed wing and have a launching system and a net to catch drones. Packages are dropped at 100 feet while the drone is flying at high speed requiring a parachute and a 5 meter wide landing zone which makes it undesirable for large scale adoption.

[bitcharmer]

> Drones aren’t necessarily electric

That's very interesting. What are current (commercially viable) alternatives to electric drones?

[myself248]

Just search "drone engine" or "UAV engine", there are tons of fuel-powered engines (many optimized for JP-8 since the military likes to be single-fuel) made for planes of various sizes.

The larger ones tend to have an electric generator to power the control surfaces, smaller drones tend to carry a battery for that and use the engine solely for forward propulsion.

This is for fixed-wing only, so it would apply to Zipline P1 but not P2, by the way. There have been some engine-over-electric setups to run multirotors from a single powerplant, but it's generally awful. It may or may not work for hybrid architectures like a quadplane, or a single-engine-VTOL like a tailsitter, all these things are in active development.

[Retric]

Gasoline or kerosene seem to be popular in R&D projects. Read up in the Nitro Stingray or Yeair Hybrid Quad.