Delivery companies or shipping companies have been around since the very start of the industrial age. As soon as organizations decided they wanted to sell things, there needed to be other businesses that delivered these goods to the customer. Forever the middle-man, the delivery company grew to become a cornerstone of modern society. With advancements in online technology and the rise of e-commerce, more and more delivery companies started cropping up. Fast forward a few more years and the concept of food deliveries started becoming more and more popular, allowing a new niche to be born out of this industry.
Right now, delivery businesses all follow a similar pattern. Ones that deal with delivering large goods to businesses or consumers will have a fleet of vehicles to call upon. This can be a selection of vans or trucks or compact vehicles like those made by Westward, and they're all stocked with the day's orders. Then, you have the other type of delivery business that might deliver food or grocery items that someone has ordered on an app to be delivered to them within minutes. Here, companies employ people to deliver these goods via personal vehicles - usually bikes or cars.
To be honest, it's been like this for many years and there aren't a huge amount of innovations within the industry. Perhaps the latest is that more and more companies are using electric vehicles to deliver goods, but the concept of using people and transportation has always been at the core of delivery companies.
What's interesting is looking ahead to the future and wondering what it will look like for delivery businesses. There are more and more reports and suggestions that it could look a little something like this:
Drone Deliveries
Drones burst onto the scene in the 2010s and have already proven popular with professionals and hobbyists. Most people see drones as flying cameras, but they can do much more than this. We've already seen drone use in industries such as agriculture, and they are also popping up in the delivery world. Amazon has been keen to get a drone force operating for some time, with the idea that these little flying gadgets deliver goods to people.
Could we see more of this in the future? It certainly seems like a genius idea for delivery companies that want to deliver goods as soon as possible. For instance, if you order food on UberEats, the restaurant could fulfill it through a drone. It bypasses all the traffic and can take a faster aerial route to get to you. Thus, the delivery is quicker, and it could be cheaper as the cost of labor will be less.
It's a brilliant concept that will reduce the number of vehicles on the roads and could improve convenience for the customer. It's just strange to imagine a world with drones flying around above our heads, but this could be something we get to live with very soon.
Driverless Deliveries
Another potential idea for delivery companies is to entertain the idea of driverless deliveries. Or, more specifically, autonomous vehicles that still have a driver inside them, only the driver doesn't control the car. They are simply there to deliver the goods, but they don't have to focus on actually driving.
Now, you can already see a few benefits of this idea. For one, you don't have to be the most experienced car accident attorney to realize that tiredness causes accidents, and most accidents are caused by tired delivery drivers. Being in a vehicle for long hours can be draining, particularly when you have to focus on the road at all times. With autonomous vehicles, the human concedes control to the car, and it drives itself. Thus, there are fewer chances of accidents happening because human error and tiredness are taken out of the equation.
Another benefit is that autonomous vehicles can be programmed to take the most convenient routes possible. Therefore, they can find the fastest route to get from one customer to another. This is definitely something that will happen in the future, particularly as autonomous vehicles are becoming more and more talked about. Once the technology has been refined - and with the fail-safe in place of a human in the cockpit - there's no reason driverless delivery trucks can't become a thing.
So, the future of delivery businesses looks like this; trucks that drive themselves and drones in the sky! It's crazy to picture, but it could become our reality a lot sooner than we think. Both ideas can improve delivery times and reliability, and if the autonomous vehicles are also electric, then both will also reduce CO2 emissions from road transport.