Cliffton: 10-to-50-mile instant delivery requires a 50-pound autonomous electric aircraft
Keller Rinaudo Cliffton · Delivering the future in drones with Keller Rinaudo Cliffton of Zipline · Jul 13, 2023 · at 7:47
Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton describes the first-principles engineering rationale behind choosing lightweight autonomous delivery drones over ground transport.
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“We had this sense that if you wanted to deliver something very quickly over a distance of anywhere from, you know, say, 10 to 50 miles, you wanted to do that with a vehicle that was 10 times as fast as traditional logistics, half the cost, and zero emission. And so we had a sense, just reasoning from first principles, that what you really needed was a vehicle that was electric, that was autonomous, that weighed more like 50 pounds rather than 4000 pounds and if we wanted to go really fast, we knew we probably needed to fly rather than drive.”
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