A truck travels a greater distance to deliver those 500 packages to the same locations, as it must take roads instead of flying in a straight line. And roads are much more likely to have people on them than a random patch of ground. Also the truck weighs several tons. The weight requires more energy to move stuff around, and has more kinetic energy than an 80lb drone.

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throwawaylaptop 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You should really consider how much energy it takes to levitate an 80lb drone while flying across town, compared to how much energy it takes to roll an 8000lb van across town (even ignoring the fact that the van might deliver 100 packages while making it's way across town).

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throwaway2037 17 minutes ago | parent [-]

You raise an interesting point about energy per delivery. In you example, which one is lower per package? I assume the electric truck.

	▲	throwawaylaptop 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Considering the distance from one delivery to the next in a van is short, and the warehouse to town distance is split via a hundred packages, it just has to be the electric van. Maybe things will make more sense if the drone can carry 20 lightweight packages. But even then you gotta wonder how much energy it takes to hover/fight gravity the entirety of the trip.