Amazon Envisions Delivery System of the Future with 3-D Printing Trucks

Getty Images(NEW YORK) — Drone delivery may be a distant dream for Amazon, but it’s not stopping the e-commerce giant from employing a ground fleet of trucks equipped with 3-D printers to help get goods to customers even faster.

Amazon is obsessed with dreaming up ways to get goods to customers even faster in the future and in a newly filed patent application, the company revealed how its hypothetical trucks would be able to print goods while traveling to deliver them to the customer.

While 3D printers don’t cover everything on Amazon’s site, the idea would be for customers to place an order for something, such as a spare part.

Amazon wouldn’t have to store the inventory and would instead 3-D print what was needed on demand, and deliver it to the customer even faster.

Amazon did not immediately respond to ABC News’ request for comment on the proposed delivery system.

Earlier this month, the company’s vision of drones delivering goods hit another roadblock when the Federal Aviation Administration released new proposals for commercial drone operations, but with several caveats that would keep Amazon Prime Air from become a reality.

While the rules could take as long as two years to be adopted, they seem to be a significant roadblock on Amazon’s plans to create a drone delivery network that CEO Jeff Bezos has said he hopes will one day be as common as seeing a mail truck.

“Based on the proposal, even then those rules wouldn’t allow Prime Air to operate in the United States,” Paul Misener, vice president of global public policy at Amazon, said in a statement to ABC News.

“The FAA needs to begin and expeditiously complete the formal process to address the needs of our business, and ultimately our customers. We are committed to realizing our vision for Prime Air and are prepared to deploy where we have the regulatory support we need,” he said.

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