The drone-delivery service beating Amazon to your front door

“It’s so cool," says Button, who has worked as the city clerk for 48 years. “It’s like something out of the future, but I guess we are the future."

This modern-day manna from heaven, including takeout meals and treats for neighborhood kids, is enabled by drone delivery startup Zipline. A dark horse in the flying delivery race—competitors include Amazon and Google parent Alphabet—has emerged as a front-runner. Last week it pulled back the curtain on its system to bring what it calls “teleportation" to backyards, driveways and parking lots across the U.S.

What cheap, ubiquitous drone delivery could enable is mind-boggling. No more soggy fries delivered in two-ton vehicles by humans. No more last-minute trips to the store. And seniors and people with disabilities could have increased independence, with easier access to medications and other necessities on short notice.

For now, initial commercial testing in the U.S. is happening in Pea Ridge and Mesquite, Texas, just outside Dallas. Walmart is the only retail operation Zipline delivers for in the U.S. at present. For future partners, Zipline has designed a small pickup kiosk that can be installed just outside any building. The company will also soon be delivering for Chipotle, and has signed contracts with dozens of other retailers, restaurants and health systems.

Alphabet’s Wing drone service is already in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, delivering from 18 Walmarts to 40 nearby towns and cities within the drones’ six-mile range.

Amazon is operating its drone delivery service in College Station, Texas, and an area near Phoenix, but in terms of scale, the online retail giant remains a distant third.

Engineers at Zipline recently gave me a virtual tour of the facilities where the company is scaling up production of its drones. In its South San Francisco facility, the company can manufacture a drone in a few hours, and projects that by year’s end, it will make one every hour.

Alex Blake, director of drone technology and operations at Walmart, says that the company has had “tremendous success" in its delivery programs with both Zipline and Wing. “We can’t speak to which is better – time will tell," she adds.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on March 14 that the Federal Aviation Administration will soon announce new rules that will make it easier for automated drone delivery services to launch. Currently, companies must individually seek permission to operate drones autonomously, and some in the industry have been lobbying to simplify that process.

While drone delivery could eat into the delivery-driver labor market, the upside could be more deliveries overall. Already, Americans spend an estimated $120 billion a year on app-based food delivery alone, according to data from DoorDash and Bloomberg Second Measure.

Flocks of drones

Until recently, Pea Ridge was best known for something that happened in 1862—a pivotal Civil War battle. But thanks to its proximity to Walmart’s Bentonville headquarters, it is now ground zero for the megaretailer’s high-tech battle against Amazon.

“At nighttime, it’s the coolest thing, the skies are just lit up with these drones," says Button.

Locals sit in the parking lot of the nearby Walmart from which they take off just to watch them, she adds. That Walmart includes a launch station for Zipline’s new five-rotor drones, which are able to deliver to what the company says is an area no bigger than a dinner plate, on just about any flat surface visible from the sky.

Since its founding in 2014, Zipline has raised more than $500 million from investors, and has made more than 1.4 million drone deliveries in seven countries.

Zipline previously specialized in fixed-wing delivery drones—little autonomous airplanes—that parachuted medical supplies and other items into big open spaces. The company serves more than 5,000 hospitals and health facilities worldwide, including years of success delivering blood to hospitals in Rwanda. The company’s experience in harsh conditions has helped his team understand how to make drone delivery work, says CEO Keller Rinaudo.

Its new design is meant to address the safety and convenience needs of densely populated U.S. neighborhoods. Its features include a tilt rotor, so the drones can fly like a plane and hover like a helicopter, both key to the drone’s versatility and range, says Joseph Mardall, head of engineering at Zipline.

Zipline’s electric drone can fly up to 70 mph and makes deliveries by lowering a small cooler on a 300-foot cable. By staying high in the air, the system makes less noise, an issue that some have cited as an issue with other delivery systems, including Amazon’s.

“Since launching the new MK30 drone—which we purposefully designed to be even more quiet than our previous drone—we haven’t received any community complaints and the feedback from local officials has been positive," says Amazon spokesman Av Zammit.

Zipline’s delivery unit also has its own propellers, so it can steer its 8-pound payload around to make a precise delivery, even in gale force winds.

The FAA certified Zipline’s 55-pound drone—which is 6 feet wide and 7 feet long—for fully autonomous flight. It can fly if two of its five rotors are knocked out, has backup flight computers and even an emergency parachute.

Zipline’s drones have flown 100 million miles autonomously, with zero safety incidents, says Rinaudo. The company showed me its extensive testing regimen, including systems that violently shake its drones to simulate rough weather and chambers that freeze and bake parts to simulate long-term wear and tear.

Battling giants

On a recent busy weekend, Alphabet’s Wing delivery drones completed more than 1,200 deliveries for Walmart in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, where the company has also partnered with DoorDash, says a spokeswoman. The company will soon expand to Charlotte, N.C., and has already made more than 450,000 deliveries in the U.S., Europe and Australia.

Wing’s latest electric drone, unveiled in early 2024, is much larger, and can carry packages twice as heavy as the previous model—up to 5 pounds. It lacks a steerable delivery cooler like Zipline’s, however, instead using disposable, Happy Meal-like boxes.

Amazon, arguably the company that kicked off the race, is lagging. Its latest electric drone hovers 13 feet above the ground when it drops packages, kicking up dust and even jostling packages after they land. (And yes, it means everything inside has to survive a 13-foot drop.)

Amazon’s drones are designed specifically for superfast delivery of about two-thirds of the items the company typically offers for fast delivery, says a company spokesman. All items are tested to survive the drop and placed in specially padded packages that hold up to 5 pounds. Amazon avoided using a tether system to ensure a simple and robust design, he adds.

Amazon may be in third place, but it isn’t to be counted out, given its ability to develop slowly then quickly ramp up—as it has with robot systems in fulfillment centers. The company’s goal is to have Prime Air drones deliver 500 million packages globally by the end of the decade.

As with other forms of package delivery, this isn’t necessarily a winner-take-all market. It is just too big and too varied. It isn’t clear that the optimal platform to deliver a burrito from Chipotle or a T-shirt from Walmart is necessarily the best one to deliver same-day Amazon packages. And even as these drones make their first deliveries to paying customers, the evolution of their design and capabilities has only just begun.

“My take here is that it’s 12:01 a.m. in this industry, and everything has yet to be built," says Zipline’s Rinaudo. “I often joke with my team that we’re going to look back in eight years, and think, ‘Oh, my God, can you believe what idiots we were?’ "