Thread by @ryanzip

1/ Today, Zipline unveiled our next generation delivery drone system, designed to provide the best home delivery service the planet has ever seen. It's so out-there that you probably won't believe your eyes... 🧵

2/ We're building on top of the tens of millions of miles we've already flown - half a million fully autonomous commercial deliveries over the last 7 years in 8 countries

3/ Back to the new thing - we started by asking ourselves how could you build a delivery network that's better in *every way* than the gas-guzzling, traffic-blocked, ever-more-expensive cars & roads system we're being let down by today

4/ The first innovation is the delivery droid, enabling us to safely deliver into small, protected, (often cluttered!) environments. Let's dig into how this cute lil bot works...

5/ First, the droid lets us keep the mamma drone far, far away, making for a dead silent delivery experience that you'll love and your neighbor won't ever know even happened. We call this "passing the neighbor test"

6/ The delivery droid is silent and cute. It has a few small thrusters to fight the wind and steer to a target its perception system dynamically identifies

7/ Meanwhile, the drone is literally just a silent speck in the sky for the ~10 sec end-to-end delivery experience

8/ And yes, this works even in gusting winds, pouring rain, day, night, fog, snow, etc. At Zipline, we're only interested in solving problems that work reliably in the real world

9/ The other breakthrough innovation is how easy it is for anyone to teleport goods, using what we call the loading portal. A droid magically appears inside your back-of-house business. Simply open its lid and drop the goods in

10/ The droid automatically retracts into the mamma drone and together they fly away

11/ Another key piece of this puzzle is the dock. We asked ourselves "how can we allow any business to become part of the Zipline drone delivery network?"

12/ The dock is both a charger and where we temporarily land to scoop up orders. It is designed as a flexible mounting system to easily adapt to any business's footprint and volume needs. Small sites might have 2 docks. High-volume sites can have dozens for 1000+ deliveries a day

13/ With this new drone, droid, and dock system, metro areas can become drone networks, autonomously, silently, and damn-near invisibly transporting what you need, when you need it, instantly to your porch

14/ Best of all, this new technology produces 34x less carbon than traditional cars, and nearly 9x less energy than driving an electric car

15/ We deserve a future with fewer cars on the road, fewer idling trucks, no guilt about the emissions and packaging waste from the things we get delivered. A future where what you need appears in minutes not days. A future where moving matter gets cheaper over time.

Watch the full unveil for plenty more details on what, how, and why