The London-based startup Starship announced today a new product for local delivery. With a such name I could not miss it. But contrary to the previous news about delivery robots, this one fits better how I see things going in the future.

In the past few years we have seen news report about drones flying around to deliver packages, and most of these ideas are dumb on a technical point of view. Sure, when Amazon said that they would deliver by drones they made a great media stunt, but that’s it. The only market where using drones beats the use of vehicles is for ultra fast delivery, but at what cost? And how often do you need something marginaly faster than what a car can do? The only

The reasons drones are not well suited for parcel delivery is that they use a lot of energy. A hell lot more than a vehicle. A drone will need to use energy in order to move from A to B, much like any vehicle, but needs also much more energy to hover. And therefore needs storage for this extra energy, which adds weight, which raise the energy use for the hovering…

Low-speed vehicles have always been more efficient: the drag increases with the square of the speed of your vehicle. The main reason they are not ubiquitous today is because you need a driver, and humans are expensive, heavy and need luxury like a seat, air-conditioning, a dashboard. But progress has been made in self-driving cars and even if we are still many years before a computer can fully drive a car like a human, they can now perform quite well in low-speed environment (and at high speed with a friendly road like a highway). This is ideal for the distribution of packages.