alt Hacker News"415 metric tons of goods. That means they have about five times more cargo space than an airplane, but are five times smaller in length than a typical container ship."
Not to take anything away from this (it's great), but for reference, an average vessel in Maersk's fleet can carry about 100,000 metric tons so you'd need about 250 of these to replace a single container ship.
Not sure why the article decided to compare cargo capacity of a airplane with the length of a container ship, but alas.
Replies
This was my exact intuition. At 450 metric ton, we're three orders of magnitude away from what large container ships can do. It's a nice PoC but this is clearly just PR from DHL.
Air freight is also an odd comparison since it's usually time-sensitive and/or pricey ($100+ per pound).
The important metric should be emissions per metric ton though, including construction of the ships.
Urm, it's pretty well documented that historically the biggest deciding factor in shipping is cost. The size of the vessel and the travel speed are unimportant vs cost of the journey. So if they can essentially remove fuel cost, they're able to reduce the shipping cost and hence outcompete bigger vessels on the only metric that had historically mattered in that industry
[flagged]
This might be useful for a tiny island. Ship from a large Caribbean island to a small one for example. The distance means the round trip is day (night?) trip, and there a things you want shipped in every day, but airplanes are expensive. I'm sure there are other niches where there is only a small amount of cargo going from point A to point B as well. However in general the world needs more cargo and so this doesn't make sense for most.