Former Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson isn’t just bringing a new show to Amazon.com, Inc., but has also taken on the role as company spokesman in a new video showing the company’s latest delivery drone.

The ad for the new Amazon Prime Air delivery drone shows a new, more powerful hybrid drone design along with the obligatory “how it works” demonstration; in this case how a new pair of running shoes can be delivered.

While perhaps a combination of wishful thinking and futurism, the video explains that all a potential Amazon customer will have to do is to place their order and then place a marker in their backyard to tell the drone where to land.

From that point on the autonomous robot drone (yes, there’s no human operator) uses a mix of horizontal and vertical propellers to ferry the shipment up to 15 miles from its home base in 30 minutes or less.

Customers waiting for their delivery are also given a notification when the drone is close to arriving so they are able to greet the drone and grab their package when it arrives versus having a neighbor grab it instead.

“In time, there will be a whole family of Amazon drones, different designs for different environments,” Clarkson explains. “This one can fly for 15 miles, and it knows what’s happening around it. It uses ‘sense and avoid’ technology to well, sense, and then avoid, obstacles on the ground and in the air.”

Politics

While on the surface the video appears to be nothing more than a nice advertorial about what Amazon plans to use drones for, there is potentially an underlying political message in the promo given that the company has so far been unable to obtain approval in the United States to operate a drone delivery service.

As of the beginning of November, Amazon signed on with Google and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. to a government task force headed up by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to help devise an identification and registration system for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). But while that’s a positive step forward, it’s still a bigger leap yet, at least in terms of government approval, to get to the point where Amazon can actually roll out of a fleet of delivery drones.

Amazon’s vision of the future of drone package delivery is a noble one, but the underlying message is that the hand of the nanny state is the only thing stopping it from being able to do so.

Image credit: Amazon