Amazon is pulling out all the stops in their competition with traditional brick and mortar retailers. They used to be free from taxes, but many major markets now tax internet sales. They’re currently experimenting with local storage lockers, they might single-handedly save the US Postal Service, and they’re now talking high tech.
Yup. Drone technology might be the new front in their war on package delivery times. Dubbed Prime Air, these unmanned aircraft will be capable of carrying up to a five pound payload. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but over 80% of Amazon’s shipments are less than five pounds. For customers within a Prime Air zone, packages could be delivered in as little as 30 minutes. It sounds like a great solution for those times you need a cable or memory card quickly. There’s no way I could make a trip to an electronics store and back home in Los Angeles in less than half an hour.
Sign me up!
Pump your brakes there Juan. There are still plenty of kinks to work out. Sure there’s still technology hoops to jump through, but the bigger issue is getting swarms of flying devices through FAA approvals.
Still, CEO Jeff Bezos is optimistic that we could see an Amazon Air Force relatively soon, like four or five years. Maybe on the outside chance this happens quickly, we might even see a limited trial of the service by the end of 2015.
We wont have flying cars like Back to the Future 2 promised us we’d have, but if I don’t have to leave my house for deliveries, that might be almost as good! Check the Amazon video below for more info on Prime Air.
