Amazon's Delivery Drones Are Crashing, and We Finally Know Why
Amazon, the multi-trillion dollar e-commerce monolith, seemingly cheaped out on on a key feature installed on its six-propeller delivery drones. Predictably, this backfired almost immediately.
On a (lightly) rainy December day at the company's testing range in Oregon, not one but two Prime Air drones suddenly stopped spinning their propellers mid-flight and plummeted some 200 feet to the ground. The crashes, which destroyed both aircraft, happened within minutes of each other.
And now, Bloomberg reports, we know why. According to documents from the National Transportation Safety Board, bad readings from the drones' onboard lidar sensors led the drones to believe they had already landed. Their software, thinking it was on solid ground, cluelessly cut off power to the propellers.
But that's not all. After Amazon decided to remove them, the drones no longer had backup sensors that were equipped on older versions. And these probably would've prevented the drones from shutting down, per Bloomberg's sources.
Amazon denies this line of thinking.
"Bloomberg's reporting is misleading," an Amazon spokesperson told the newspaper. "Statements that assume that replacing one system with another would have prevented an accident in the past is irresponsible."
Per the NTSB documents, a botched software update made the lidar sensors more susceptible to being thrown off by rain. Lidar is short for light detection and ranging, a form of technology that uses lasers to scan surroundings in a similar manner to radar.
A glitch may have been the main reason, but it definitely sounds like it could've been easily avoidable had Amazon kept the redundant system from its previous drone, the MK27.
The backup sensors came in the form of two metal prongs on the bottom of the drone called squat switches. When the drone lands, the switches are depressed, providing confirmation that it's on solid ground. A source told Bloomberg that the MK27 drone's software was originally designed to confirm a landing only when two of its three sensors agreed.
This was removed with the MK30, and it's unclear why. Reducing costs could be one reason, and it's not uncommon to remove redundant systems to streamline a device.
It could also be because of a shift in how Amazon intends to deliver packages with its drones, according to a Bloomberg source. The MK27 was designed to make deliveries by landing in a customer's yard, with enclosed propellers to make them safer. The MK30 moved away from this and drops packages from around a dozen feet in the air.
This is far from the only setback Amazon has faced during its drone development, which it first announced back in 2013. In 2021, a drone crash sparked an acres-wide blaze in Oregon, and outside of incidents like that, many residents living where the drones are being trialed simply find them annoying. After the latest December SNAFU, Amazon halted future experiments for months — though it maintained that the crashes weren't the "primary reason" — and only recently lifted the pause.
Overall, development has been sluggish and the project remains years behind schedule. Currently, Amazon is only carrying out drone deliveries in College Station, Texas, and Tolleson, Arizona.
More on Amazon: The NYPD Is Sending Drones to the Sites of 9-1-1 Calls
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Plus gets you access to a variety of models not available in the Free plan, such as GPT-4.5, o3, o4-mini, and o4-mini-high. It extends limits on data analysis, deep research, file uploads, and image generation. It also unlocks the ability to create custom GPTs, projects, and tasks, and offers limited access to the Sora video generation feature. For comparison, both Google's top-tier version of with Gemini Advanced and Microsoft's Pro cost $20 per month. However, you also get bonuses like 2TB of storage or Copilot functionality in apps, so ChatGPT feels a little lacking outside of chatbot-related features. ChatGPT is available on the web, though you can also download dedicated apps for mobile (Android and iOS) and desktop (macOS and Windows) devices. OpenAI also has an official ChatGPT extension for Google Chrome, which makes ChatGPT your default search engine. Official extensions aren't available for Firefox or Safari, but third-party extensions are. Beyond ChatGPT's apps and web interface, you can access the chatbot indirectly in lots of ways. For example, , while Microsoft's Copilot uses the same 4-series of models as ChatGPT itself. Many different sites and services use OpenAI's models, like and Perplexity. You won't always see explicit ChatGPT branding, however, and OpenAI likely doesn't take part in their development. These also tend not to have access to the full suite of ChatGPT features. You can use ChatGPT without an account, but signing in unlocks many more features, including the ability to see your chat history and upload files. ChatGPT's dashboard is uncluttered. It presents you with an Ask Anything field front and center with various options, such as dictation or searching the web. A menu on the left shows your chat history alongside links to custom GPTs and the Sora video generation feature. 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In general, if you don't like ChatGPT's tone, you can change it. OpenAI recently announced that lets it remember everything you tell it and reference prior conversations. That feature didn't work for me, however, so it might still be in the process of rolling out across ChatGPT's plans. The buttons below responses allow you to copy, read aloud, or regenerate messages. To share a whole chat, click the Share button at the top right of the interface. Deep research and generated images also get shareable links. Voice mode is similarly easy to use. Just click on the waveform at the bottom right corner of your chat box to get started. In voice mode, you can choose between different voices, and you have the option to mute your microphone when you want ChatGPT to stop listening. Otherwise, you can simply talk to ChatGPT, and it responds automatically. Voice mode is convincing and lifelike, just like . Searching the web is a standard feature of AI chatbots. 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You can hover over these with your cursor to get more details. These links even go so far as to highlight the specific, relevant text when you open the source. This makes fact-checking incredibly easy. Gemini lists sources below each major section of the report, footnoting certain sources in the text, and then gives you the complete list of sources and searches at the end. This system makes it much more difficult to connect the sources it cites to the claims it makes. So, although Gemini's deep research tool tends to use more sources than ChatGPT's in my experience, I prefer ChatGPT's sourcing approach. Gemini does have some quality of life features that ChatGPT doesn't, such as cleaner formatting and a one-click way to export your report to Google Docs. The deep research interface on Gemini is also clearer and makes better use of screen real estate. ChatGPT reduces deep research to a loading bar and locks its research activity away in a menu on the right side of the screen. It's more difficult to parse and feels comparatively cluttered. Lastly, the tone of deep research across ChatGPT and Gemini is different. Gemini reports read like academic papers, while ChatGPT's reports feel more like a guide you might read online or an elaborate Reddit post. I found ChatGPT's reports more engaging, but you might disagree based on your preferences and research topic. You can generate images with ChatGPT, just like with Copilot and Gemini. To start, I tested the chatbots' abilities to create photorealistic images. I used the following prompt in ChatGPT (GPT-4o), Copilot, and Gemini (2.0 Flash): "Generate me a photorealistic picture of the interior of a log cabin. I want to see a wooden table and chairs in the center with yellow, ceramic dinnerware on top." Here are the results: Gemini's image looks the best at a glance, until you notice the fairly obvious distortion in the overhanging lights. 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This might improve in the future, but for now, I don't like ChatGPT for shopping. Google's Gemini integrates with , like Gmail or Docs, while Microsoft's Copilot can do the same with Microsoft 365 apps, like Outlook and . ChatGPT doesn't have an equivalent feature. You can connect your Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive accounts to ChatGPT to upload files, but that's as far as its integrations go. , ChatGPT can't be your friend, romantic partner, or therapist: It's not conscious. Whether the movie "Her" excites or terrifies you, ChatGPT isn't there yet. Not only does it lack sentience, but there are a variety of restrictions on what else ChatGPT can do. Adult content, anything illegal, realistic images of people, and taboo subjects like hate speech are against . ChatGPT does try to avoid these, but it's fairly easy to slip through the cracks and get responses that violate policy. In my testing, ChatGPT's filters were much weaker than Copilot's, but they weren't nearly as lax as Gemini's, which don't restrict much at all. ChatGPT has practical limitations, too. The context window, which goes up to 128K in the Pro and Enterprise plans, determines how much data ChatGPT processes at once, including your prompt, ChatGPT's response, and relevant contextual information. So, depending on your plan, you might need to break up long prompts and complicated requests into multiple messages. OpenAI caps usage across plans, including the Pro plan, which is 'nearly' unlimited. However, in many cases, these caps are dynamic. Free users, for example, have caps based on overall ChatGPT demand. Plus users can send up to 80 messages within a three-hour window, but that changes as necessary during peak usage hours. In my experience, I easily hit usage limits on the Free plan, but I didn't manage that with the Plus plan. Reading through , OpenAI collects a significant amount of data. This includes account information, any information you provide in surveys or events, and communications with OpenAI. Beyond the basics, OpenAI also collects a host of analytics data, including location information by way of IP address or GPS, information about your devices, log data from your browsers and devices, and usage data. Perhaps most importantly, OpenAI collects user content data, which includes whatever you write in prompts or send in messages to ChatGPT. The purpose of this is to . OpenAI takes 'steps to reduce the amount of personal information in [its] training datasets before they are used to improve and train [its] models,' but you can opt out. OpenAI enables user content data collection for training use by default. Although it doesn't include audio or voice recording data in that collection by default, you can choose to allow that if you wish. Despite these collection policies, OpenAI never sells or shares personal data for advertising purposes. but reportedly didn't get access to OpenAI's core systems. OpenAI was not forthcoming with this information, though, as the news broke only in 2024. OpenAI continues to be a target for hackers, such as . Considering how much data OpenAI collects, how OpenAI has been breached before, and how OpenAI doesn't always report these breaches in a timely manner, I don't recommend sharing anything too sensitive with ChatGPT.
