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Wing Drones to Start Silicon Valley Deliveries This Year
Wing Already Offers Drone Delivery in North Carolina, Virginia and Australia
Bloomberg News
Alphabet Inc.’s drone delivery company Wing will begin delivering parcels to homes in the San Francisco Bay Area this year, marking its latest expansion in a small but fast-growing market.
Partnering with companies including Walmart Inc. and DoorDash Inc., Wing already offers drone delivery in North Carolina, Virginia and Australia, but this is the first time that consumers in the company’s home market will be able to try out the technology, the t March 23.
Wing, which flies parcels attached to a white and yellow drone with many helicopter-like propellers, did not give a date for the launch or list specific cities.
Wing’s efforts are part of a growing campaign by popular consumer apps such as Grubhub and Uber Technologies Inc. to deliver packages via drone, betting that shoppers and retailers will embrace the technology in the race for ever-faster service.
The Federal Aviation Administration tightly regulates airspace, and the companies’ efforts remain limited in scale.
Since our very first deliveries at the Googleplex, the question we’ve heard most is: “When can I get drone delivery at my house?”
We're happy to share that Wing will officially deliver to homes across the Bay Area in the coming year!
Read more: — Wing (@Wing)
“Bringing drone delivery to the Bay Area is another step in Wing’s ambitious plan to turn drone delivery into a national logistics network,” the company said in the blog post.
Wing emerged from Alphabet’s moonshot lab, X, which captured the public imagination with its pledge to take novel approaches to some of society’s biggest problems. As Alphabet sharpens its focus on artificial intelligence to keep pace with rivals, the company has trimmed X’s budget and pushed many of the ventures tospin outas independent companies in recent years.
Walmart rank No. 1 on theTransport Topics Top 100 list of the largest private carriersin North America.
