Amazon Prime Air - drone delivery

Amazon already offers delivery in some markets in as little as one hour with Amazon Prime Now, but that still relies upon humans driving cars. How quaint. Amazon’s next big idea is the deploy an army of drones to deliver packages over a wide area in as little as 30 minutes. Prime Air was unveiled as a concept several years ago, but Amazon is still developing it. Amazon exec Paul Misener has revealed more details about how Prime Air will work in an interview with Yahoo Tech.

Amazon thinks that in order to get delivery times to half an hour, the drones will need to have a range of about 10 miles. That probably means areas with Prime Now warehouses will serve as hubs for the drones. The drones themselves will weight about 55 pounds and have a maximum payload of five pounds. So, that giant TV you ordered will probably still make its way to you on a truck. Still, most things Amazon sells weight less than five pounds. Misener doesn’t know if it’s going to cost anything extra, though.

Amazon has yet to come up with a good way to deliver to those in apartments, but if you live in a house, the drone will just drop the package on your doorstep. If your yard has lots of obstacles, that’s no problem, according to Misener. He compares Amazon’s drones to horses as opposed to cars, which makes more sense than you’d expect. A car will go wherever you steer it, even if you steer it into the tree in your front yard. A horse, on the other hand, will go around the tree because it prefers not to run into things. The drones will be the same — they can avoid obstacles even if an operator steers it into one.

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