Why will Amazon’s drones be grounded in Lockeford?

23 April 20242 weeks ago babelfish

Eleven years ago Bezos claimed that the company was now close to intensive use of drones, yet Amazon decided to close its drone delivery program in Lockeford, California, less than two years after the tests began

Shopping through drones risks remaining a futuristic dream, although experiments in this direction are increasing. In 2013, then-CEO Jeff Bezos said drone deliveries would become a reality within five years. 11 years have passed and when you order something the courier still rings the doorbell: a ring that suggests to us that that statement was guilty of excessive optimism. In fact, even a giant like Amazon has to deal with a new methodology full of unknowns, as demonstrated by the fact that the e-commerce company is closing its Prime Air drone delivery program in Lockeford, California.

AMAZON ABANDONS TESTING WITH DRONES?

This is one of the first areas where the experimentation of the service was active which allowed residents to order products weighing up to five kilos and have them delivered by drones in 30 minutes: as reported by The Verge , Amazon aimed to make 10,000 “flying” deliveries by the end of 2023 but in June there had been just a hundred.

HAVE THE ZIPLINE DRONES GIVEN THE TURBO?

Numbers that could give some more information on the reasons behind this decision. Even more so if read while keeping in mind those disclosed by rival delivery company Zipline , which declared it had completed 1,000,000 deliveries as of April 19th.

AMAZON PARCELAGES WILL CONTINUE TO FLY

The market potentially exists, therefore. Perhaps also for this reason, Amazon for its part is keen to reiterate that, despite the closure of a service that had only been inaugurated in Lockeford in 2022, it will not abandon experimentation with drones.

Indeed, in the same press release it announced the inauguration of a new Prime Air headquarters in Tolleson, Arizona. This time, however, we are no longer talking about half-hour deliveries but "same-day" deliveries to residents of the West Valley metropolitan area of Phoenix. Delivery air operations are expected to begin later this year.

Amazon also added that it plans to open new locations in 2025 and noted that it will continue to operate Prime Air in College Station, Texas. Meanwhile, the giant founded by Bezos recalled that the company's latest MK30 drone – less heavy and capable of flying in the rain – is still in the testing phase. This is a model that will replace the current ones, which have sometimes been involved in accidents that have led to the vehicle crashing. The only thing that isn't losing ground, however, is the question we've all been asking ourselves for more than ten years: will drone deliveries ever really take off?

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/come-mai-i-droni-di-amazon-resteranno-a-terra-a-lockeford/ on Tue, 23 Apr 2024 07:57:26 +0000.