Featured Image Credit: Bloomberg / Contributor / Getty
It's 2026, but finally, it looks like we're catching up to the high-tech future of Back to the Future.
While we've not quite got to the flying cars of Blade Runner, recent progress with Elon Musk's Optimus robots has us feeling a little more like we're in a real-life version of I, Robot.
While the world's richest man is known for pushing us forward in terms of vehicles and robotics, another billionaire is snapping at his heels with his own innovation.
It's fair to say there's not much love lost between Musk and Jeff Bezos, with the former calling the Amazon overlord "a bit of a tool."
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There's no escaping the power of tech companies, and you only have to see how the Met Gala was branded the 'Tech Gala' by many after Bezos and Lauren Sánchez sponsored this year's event. Amazon is among the 'Big Five' of tech companies, and with a current market cap of $2.94 trillion, it could soon enter that exclusive three trillion club.
Hoping to add a few more dollars to Amazon's bank balance, it's now rolling out its drone deliveries to the United Kingdom.
Although Bezos initially floated the idea of Amazon Prime Air in 2013, it took until 2022 for the company's custom MK30 delivery drones to take flight. It didn't exactly take off, with the cost of a delivery in US trials starting at $484. Even though it was hoped this would come down to as little as $63 in 2025, this is still nearly 20 times the average ground delivery cost.
Instead of focusing on densely populated metropolitan hubs like central Manhattan, Amazon Prime Air has been restricted to the likes of Texas' College Station and Arizona's West Valley Phoenix, with the original launch site of Lockeford, California, closing in April 2024.
Amazon is celebrating its UK launch, although it's again limited to a small rural area of Darlington, County Durham. According to the BBC, packages that weigh less than 5lb can be delivered within a 12km radius of the Amazon fulfilment center. Deliveries tend to be the likes of beauty products and batteries, but according to Airbnb owner Rob Shield, he had fun when his farm was selected for Amazon's test runs: "Initially, it was a novelty, so we were ordering everything under the sun. Pens, paper, chocolates - anything to make it keep coming."
With drones arriving, Shield's packages were dropped in parcels the size of a shoebox, falling from a height of 12ft.
Shield explained how it was something of a tourist attraction for locals: "We'd have people come just to see it. Since then, you obviously start realising 'I actually need something today' like tape measures and stuff like that you're always losing - we just order it and it comes."
Not everyone in Darlington was sold on the idea, with one resident telling the BBC: "I think I'd rather somebody actually handed me my parcel than dropping it into my garden."
Another was firmly against the idea of drone deliveries, calling it as "nutty as a fruitcake."
Despite it taking over 10 years for Amazon to get this far, David Carbon, vice president of Amazon Prime Air, admitted: "The certainty is people have never told us they want their stuff slower. If you've got kids and you want fever medication, you want it. You don't want to drive to the store."
Amazon's UK fleet can currently deliver within two hours, but according to Carbon, the USA has it down to just 36 minutes.
Spotting a potential problem with Amazon Prime Air, Dr Anna Jackman, an associate professor of geography at the University of Reading, noted: "A lot of our demand for delivery services are in urban centres. They are very densely populated, very congested. And the reality is [drone deliveries] don't work well in high-rise buildings."
This could be adapted into rooftop deliveries or centrally-located hubs, but Jackman says, "Right now we're not there yet."
There are also concerns about safety, although Carbon reiterated: "This is effectively an autonomous drone that can do what a pilot does in a flight deck. It can do what ground crews do, and it can deliver a package...We have a targeted level of safety that's measured in aerospace terms."
Darlington is currently the only place outside the USA that has approval for Amazon's drones, made possible by the Civil Aviation Authority granting permission for a trial until the end of 2026.
