Should Amazon deliver orders with drones?

Because Häagen-Dazs is awesome.

Because Häagen-Dazs is awesome.

I didn't really think that through when I wrote it: can you really order ice cream from Amazon? That drone would have to move pretty quickly here in LA to get it to my door before the ice cream turned into a puddle of goop.

OTOH, my colleagues in our Chicago office wouldn't have to worry.

Yeah - our ice cream would arrive even colder than when it was in the amazon freezer....

agreed

Refrigerated drone deliveries ... that Hackaday prize still open?

It's colder the higher they fly, The drones would have to know what cargo there carrying . You wouldn't want a cold beverage frozen .

Great point, Daniel. And cold temperatures can also wreak havoc on a lot of consumer electronics. I once consulted with a company and helped it determine why its LCD-based product so often arrived at new customers' doors in a damaged state. I worked with the warranty department and generated a large map of the United States with push pins on it-- green ones showing the shipments that arrived undamaged, and red pins representing damaged units.

Turns out that the complaints about cracked LCD screens all came from addresses above the 40th parallel, where temperatures had plummeted during a prolonged cold snap that winter. Since the company was based in Arizona, it had never thought to subject its product to such low temperatures as part of its quality testing. (The unit was strictly meant for indoor use, and the CEO reasoned that the device would never be subjected to such extreme temperatures.) We put several of them in the freezer until they reached the average daily temperature in Duluth, St. Paul, and Chicago, and kept them there for a few hours.

Guess what happened?

All of the LCD screens cracked, oozing a red, gelatinous liquid which exactly matched the complaints the firm's customer service department was receiving in heavy volume.

While the moral of this story is that more thoughtful quality testing can save customers a lot of hassle, it's also that outside temperature matters a lot when shipping consumer electronics.