Amazon has released an advert for its proposed Amazon Prime Air drone delivery system. Former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson fronts the advert.

The 2 minute advert can be seen on YouTube and has attracted a large number of comments of differing persuasions as to the content of the advert. One commenter asked, ‘But what was the drone’s track time?’

Clarkson, who is going to be on a new Amazon Prime motoring TV show with former co-presenters James May and Richard Hammond, describes how a number of different drones are going to be used according to the nature of the deliveries Amazon Prime makes.

Where Amazon is known to be actively developing the drone delivery system for its Prime customers, there are a lot of issues holding the technology back. The cost of flying a 2kg item may well be very high and this will be reflected in the delivery costs to the customer. There will be safety issues, particularly in busy air spaces such as London. Finally, the regulatory hurdles are likely to be the biggest issues of all, with large amounts of air space banned to drones in the UK and in other countries.

Amazon and other delivery companies must tackle the political and safety issues as much as they will have to tackle the technological and security issues. One commenter in the YouTube thread suggested, “These drones will all be stolen during fake deliveries within a month.” Where a stolen drone may have a cut out device and be completely unusable after theft, what about the safety issues around someone leaping on top of it to steal it?

Though widely pushed in the company’s PR, drones are something that won’t be seen for quite some time. It may sell Amazon but it will probably lose it money…