Exactly ten years ago, Amazon revealed a program aimed at revolutionizing shopping and shipping. Drones launched from a central hub would float through the sky, providing just about everything anyone could need. They would be fast, innovative and ubiquitous – all the hallmarks of Amazon.
The loud announcement, made by Jeff Bezos on “60 Minutes” As part of a Cyber Monday promotional package, it attracted worldwide attention. “I know this sounds like science fiction. That’s not the case,” said Mr. Bezos, Amazon’s founder and then-chief executive. The drones would be “ready to enter commercial operation as soon as the necessary regulations are in place”, probably in 2015, the company said.
Eight years later, drone delivery is somewhat of a reality on the outskirts of College Station, Texas, northwest of Houston. This is a major accomplishment for a program that has had its ups and downs over the years and lost many of its early leaders to newer, more urgent projects.
Yet the business as it currently exists is so disappointing that Amazon can only keep drones in the air by donating items. Years of work by top aviation scientists and specialists have produced a program that sends Listerine Fresh Mint Breathing Strips or a can of Campbell’s Chunky Minestrone with Italian Sausage – but not both at once – to customers as a gift. If it’s science fiction, it’s for laughs.
A decade is an eternity when it comes to technology, but even so, drone delivery doesn’t reach the scale or simplicity of Amazon’s original promotional videos. This gap between dazzling claims and mundane reality happens all the time in Silicon Valley. Autonomous cars, metaverse, flying cars, robots, neighborhoods or even cities built from scratch, virtual universities capable of competing with Harvard, artificial intelligence, the list of delayed and incomplete promises is long.
“It’s easy to have ideas,” said Rodney Brooks, a robotics entrepreneur and frequent critic of tech company hype. “Transforming them into reality is difficult. It is even more difficult to deploy them on a large scale.
Amazon said last month that drone deliveries would expand to Britain, Italy and another unidentified U.S. city. by the end of 2024. Yet even at the threshold of growth, a question persists. Now that drones finally exist in at least a limited form, why did we think we needed them in the first place?
Dominique Lord and Leah Silverman live in the drone zone of College Station. They are fans of Amazon and regularly place orders for ground delivery. Drones are another matter, although the service is free for Amazon Prime members. While it’s cool to see items literally land in your driveway, at least the first few times, there are many obstacles to getting items this way.
Only one item can be delivered at a time. He can’t weigh more than five pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it 12 feet. Drones cannot fly when it is too hot, too windy or too rainy.
You need to be home to turn off the landing target and make sure a porch pirate doesn’t run off with your item or roll it into the street (which happened to Mr. Lord once and Mrs. Silverman). . But your car can’t stay in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the yard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees.
Amazon has also warned its customers that drone delivery is not available during periods of high demand for drone delivery.
The other active testing site in the United States is Lockeford, California, in the Central Valley. On a recent afternoon, the Lockeford location appeared largely moribund, with just three cars in the parking lot. Amazon said it was delivered via drones to Lockeford and arranged for a New York Times reporter to return to the site. She also arranged an interview with David Carbon, the former Boeing executive who leads the drone program. The company later canceled both without explanation.
A business blog post on Oct. 18, said drones have safely delivered “hundreds” of household items to College Station since December and customers can now have some medications delivered. Lockeford was not mentioned.
After Ms. Silverman and Mr. Lord expressed initial interest in the drone program, Amazon offered $100 in gift certificates in October 2022 to follow through. But their service only started in June, then was suspended during a punishing heatwave when the drones couldn’t fly.
However, the incentives continued to flow. The other day, the couple received an email from Amazon offering Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter, which usually costs $5.38 but was a “free gift” while supplies last. They ordered it, and shortly after, a drone dropped a large box containing a small jar. Amazon said “some promotional items” were being offered “as a welcome gift.”
“We don’t really need what they’re giving away for free,” said Ms. Silverman, a 51-year-old novelist and caregiver. “Drones are more like a toy than anything else – a toy that wastes a huge amount of paper and cardboard.”
Weather in Texas disrupts important deliveries. Mr. Lord, a 54-year-old professor of civil engineering at Texas A&M, ordered a drug by mail. By the time he retrieved the package, the drugs had melted. He hopes drones can eventually solve problems like this.
“I still view this program positively, knowing that it is in an experimental phase,” he said.
Amazon says drones will improve over time. It announced a new model, the MK30, last year and released photos in October. The MK30, which is expected to enter service by the end of 2024, has been touted as having greater range, the ability to fly in bad weather and a 25% reduction in “perceived noise”.
When Amazon first started working on drones years ago, the retailer took two or three days to ship many items to its customers. He feared it would be vulnerable to potential competitors whose sellers were more local, including Google and eBay. Drones were all about speed.
“We can make a delivery in half an hour,” Mr. Bezos promised on “60 Minutes.”
For a while, drones were the next big thing. Google has developed its own drone service, Wing, which now works with Walmart to deliver items to parts of Dallas and Frisco, Texas. Startups got funding: About $2.5 billion was invested between 2013 and 2019, according to Teal Group, an aerospace consultancy. The seasoned venture capitalist Tim Draper said in 2013 that “everything from pizza delivery to personal shopping can be handled by drones.” Uber Eats announced a food delivery drone late 2019. The future was up in the air.
Amazon has started to think very long term. She envisioned and obtained a patent for a drone refueling vehicle that would hover in the sky at 45,000 feet. That’s more than commercial planes, but Amazon said it could use the vehicles to deliver a hot dinner to its customers.
Yet on the ground, progress has been slow, sometimes for technical reasons, sometimes because of the company’s corporate DNA. The same aggressive reliance that created a trillion-dollar business undermined Amazon’s efforts to work with the Federal Aviation Administration.
“The attitude was, ‘We’re Amazon.’ We’re going to convince the FAA,’” said a former Amazon drone executive, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the subject. “The FAA wants companies to present themselves with great humility and transparency. This is not a strength of Amazon.
A more complex problem was getting the technology to the point where it would be safe not just most of the time, but all of the time. The first drone that lands on someone’s head or takes off while holding a cat sets the program back another decade, especially if it’s filmed.
“Part of the DNA of the tech industry is that you can accomplish things you never thought you could,” said Neil Woodward, who spent four years as a senior executive in the drone program. ‘Amazon. “But the truth is that the laws of physics don’t change.”
Mr. Woodward, now retired, spent years at NASA in the astronaut program before joining the private sector.
“When you work for government, you have 535 people on your board” – he was referring to Congress – “and a lot of them want to defund you because they have other priorities.” , did he declare. “This makes government agencies very reluctant to take risks. At Amazon, they give you a lot of rope, but you can go out on your skis.”
Ultimately there has to be a market. As Mr. Woodward said, echoing an old Silicon Valley cliché: “Do dogs like dog food? “Sometimes dogs don’t.”
Archie Conner, 82, lives a few doors down from Mr. Lord and Ms. Silverman. He sees drones less as a commercial innovation than a marketing one.
“When we hear a drone, we naturally think of Amazon. It’s really out-of-the-box thinking, even though no one is in charge at all,” he said. “Drones were in the news the other day. People say, “Wow, Amazon did that.” »
Mr. Conner also ordered free Skippy peanut butter, but forgot to turn off the landing target, so the drone took off. Then I ordered it again. Meanwhile, an Amazon delivery guy showed up with the first jar. So now he and his wife, Belinda, have two jars.
“We didn’t find much that we really wanted to pay for,” Mr. Conner said. “But we enjoyed the free peanut butter.”
