Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can’t weigh more than 5 pounds. It can’t be too big. It can’t be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can’t fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy.
You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn’t make off with your item or that it doesn’t roll into the street (which happened once to Lord and Silverman). But your car can’t be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees.
Amazon has also warned customers that drone delivery is unavailable during periods of high demand for drone delivery.
There are places delivery with drones makes a lot of sense and is the best way to do it. It depends what the most important metric is.
In an African country they are delivering medicin and bloodbaths with a drone plane to hospitals that need them for emergencys. That way they only need to have one central stock of these supply’s that can be quickly dispatched. Driving wouldn’t be an option that would take several hours over bad roads. Veritasium did a video about it.
For Amazon deliveries it makes no sense at all.
I agree with you.
I’ve mentioned ukrainian Avdiivka, a battlefield, that isn’t accesible by usual means (and where aerial drones can launch a surprise attack).
The same goes to places with destructed or underdeveloped infrastructure.
Drones can be used in the least accesible places. But they ate tested in places that are already covered by drivers.