The Platform 2 craft uses onboard computer vision to build a simple 3D map as it descends, avoiding obstacles like roofs, string lights, clotheslines, power lines, trees, and people, then lowers packages via a winch—and can operate in rain and winds up to about 38 mph.

Zipline aircraft are extremely quiet, designed so that a customer can barely hear the craft passing overhead even over bird chirping, providing a serene customer experience deemed necessary for adoption.

Instead of building a quadcopter like most drone delivery efforts, Zipline built a fixed-wing plane-like aircraft, which proved more reliable and capable of long-range delivery (furthest deliveries around 140 km).

Zipline's Platform 1 was designed with the simplest possible architecture and fewest components to maximize robustness and cost-effectiveness, resulting in a system proven reliable over a decade, crossing 100 million commercial autonomous miles.

Zipline now serves 5,000 hospitals and health facilities globally, delivers about 75% of Rwanda's national blood supply outside the capital, and delivered 20 million doses of vaccine in the last 18 months.

Platform 2 is designed to scale to every US metro, with an optimistic plan to launch in 10 to 20 major US metros next year.

Drone delivery is already less expensive than car delivery because there is no driver, it is electric, and a 50 lb vehicle delivers a 5 lb item instead of a 3,000 lb vehicle—contradicting the common perception that high-tech automation must be expensive.

The current instant-delivery model is inefficient because a 3,000 lb gas combustion vehicle driven by a human delivers items averaging only 5 pounds, making it expensive, surprisingly slow, environmentally damaging, and a source of neighborhood traffic.

Drone delivery is roughly 10 times as fast as car delivery and can economically serve a delivery radius of at least 10 miles versus the 3-4 mile limit of most delivery services, effectively 10x-ing the number of customers reachable from any given business.

For drone delivery to scale, Zipline determined it needed to be far safer, extremely quiet (designed for aeroacoustics), capable of dinner-plate-level delivery accuracy onto doorsteps, backyards, or rooftops, and installable at shipper sites in 24 hours or less with infrastructure-light processes.

Zipline installs a wall-mounted pickup portal at shipper sites (health systems like Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, the VA, or restaurants like Sweetgreen, Aino Farms, and Walmart) so anyone in the building can pass items through and have them delivered directly to a home with as little as a dinner plate of space.