27 August 2021. Drones | Buses
Drones trials that work; Hitting the road
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I was dismissive here recently about the prospects for delivery drones because of Amazon’s struggles with them, but it turns out that this might be a business model thing to do with Amazon.
At least, that’s my conclusion from reading a profile of an Irish company that seems to be delivering a viable drone delivery service to a town in Ireland.
In general, I like Irish tech entrepreneurs. They don’t have ready access to squillions of dollars of American finance capital trying to find a home, so they have to make the product work and build it up in the market instead.
And that seems to be what Manna Aero has done—the article is from earlier this year.
(Image: Manna Aero)
It’s building up a drone service in the small Galway town of Oranmore.
Last October Manna Aero began an extensive trial in the 8k-person town, located on the outskirts of Galway on the west coast of Ireland. All of the shops in town were given the opportunity to have their goods delivered to people by drone — from the pharmacy and hardware store to the local coffee shop and Thai takeaway. Anything up to a weight of 2kg can be delivered. Manna Aero charges the retailers a fixed subscription fee for the delivery service, and retailers, in turn, are charging customers somewhere between €3 and €5 for the delivery.
It seems like a decent quality trial: as well as the local retailers, Tesco and Coca Cola are also experimenting. The drones fly at a height of about 60 metres, dropping to 15 metres to deliver. Delivery time is a few minutes.
But one of the most effective markets may turn out to be meal delivery. It’s growing fast, not least because of the pandemic, but the economics of home delivery are terrible:
The Camile Thai Kitchen takeaway chain has been one of the restaurants taking part in the Oranmore trial, operating from a food truck parked outside the Tesco superstore.... Camile Thai charges customers a €2.99 delivery fee, but delivery by car or bike actually costs the company somewhere between €5.50 and €6. Then there are the high charges that restaurants pay to delivery companies like Deliveroo and Just Eat, around 30% of an order. It is one of the dirty little secrets of the restaurant trade that while these delivery aggregators have brought great convenience to customers, they are killing the margins of the food providers.
One of the reasons that Manna Earo is able to operate is because the EU has brought in new rules to enable drone services to be licensed. National rules need to be brought into line, but potentially if it can work in Ireland it can work across the EU-27.
They are still ironing out operating problems—when the drone doesn’t work, they send the item round in a car. There’s still challenges about scaling, of course, and there’s a difference between operating in a low rise suburban area like Oranmore and a highrise area like, say, Dublin. But interestingly, the company reckons that the service can be profitable in a town of 25,000 people. It doesn’t need a city-scale to make money. And maybe the future of drones is in improving delivery times—and sustainability outcomes—in areas that are a bit more spread out.
Since the piece was written Manna Aero has raised $25 million funding, and the (Irish) Collinson brothers, who own Stripe, were earlier investors.
This short news report from the Irish news channel NewstalkFM shows how it works.
#2: Hitting the road
It’s the August Bank Holiday this weekend in most of Britain, and people like to get away. So this slightly barking mad project attracted my attention; so obsessive that you just have to sit back and admire it.
(Restricted) Animal—that’s their Twitter handle—set out to find out how far he could get from the centre of London, within Britain, in 24 hours on regular scheduled buses.
He started out from London’s Charing Cross—where the UK measures distances from on a night bus towards Heathrow, and documented his entire journey in tweets, stills, and snatches of video.
(Image: [Restricted] Animal
I’m not going to spoil it by revealing where he gets to. But you do learn quite a lot about the way the bus system works along the way.
Notes from readers: Will Kemble-Clarkson recommended a podcast with the environmental scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer, who featured in yesterday’s piece on our relationships with plants.
And thanks to Clive Murgatroyd for pointing out that the image that accompanied the piece yesterday about Athens, Greece’s first Chief Heat Officer was actually of Athens, Georgia. That’s what late night picture selection does for you. It’s now fixed.
The next edition of Just Two Things will come out on Tuesday 31st August, after our Bank Holiday.
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