Amazon is one of the companies that has launched the race to start offering order deliveries with drones. However, after investing more than $2,000
million and nearly a decade of effort, their service Prime Air is still a long way from being operational.
Internal company reports published by Bloomberg reveal that Amazon managers are about to lose faith in the project due to the lack of significant progress.
The original idea was that the Prime Air service would allow Amazon to take their delivery business one step further by offering them the ability to deliver customer orders right to their doorstep. your home thanks to a fleet of your own drones.
However, this has not come to fruition mainly due to security problems. The company has not been able to guarantee that the drones are capable of making deliveries with a high enough reliability and that in the event of a problem they do not fall to the ground and catch fire .
The latter is something that Amazon already has experience with, since, at the end of March a company drone suffered a malfunction in Oregon and after landing its battery of lithium burst into flames generating a fire that spread through the nearby vegetation.
Competitors
The problems facing Amazon put it behind other companies such as UPS and Google that are also developing their respective fleets of drones with which they hope to start making home deliveries as soon as possible.
In the case of UPS, it already has permission from the Federal Aviation Administration for their drones to make deliveries. This includes the delivery of medical supplies to hospitals, something the company has been doing, on a relatively small scale, since the end of the year 2019.
The other major player in this business model is Google through one of its subsidiaries called Wing. Recently Google announced that it would start making deliveries in the city of Dallas (Texas) in a handful of neighborhoods.
Such deliveries include health products and well-being marketed by the Walgreens chain, Blue Bell Creameries brand ice cream, as well as pet medications from easyvet and first aid kits from Texas Health.
At the moment it does not seem feasible that Amazon could, in the short term, take the leap and start offering drone deliveries through Prime Air.
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