Alphabet’s Wing subsidiary is about to reach a milestone in the fledgling drone-delivery business: Any day now it will deliver its 100,000th package to a customer.
At its busiest delivery hub, in Logan City, Australia, the company earlier this month set a new internal record of 4,500 deliveries in one week. The system will one day be a far more efficient mode of transporting goods to people’s homes than what exists today, according to a top executive.
“We’re extremely bullish on our ability to offer this service at a lower cost than ground delivery very profitably over time,” said Jonathan Bass, Wing’s head of marketing and communications. “You can begin to look at this and extrapolate to what drone delivery will look like in urban and suburban environments around the world.”
Even as government regulators in the U.S. and elsewhere hash out technical requirements for this newish class of flying machines, Wing is expanding rapidly, Bass said. In addition to its Australia test sites, it has plans for growth in Virginia and Helsinki, he said.
The potentially tectonic shift to routine deliveries of sandwiches, cups of coffee and rotisserie chicken remains a long-range goal as regulators in the U.S. and elsewhere wrestle with how to craft rules.
Continue reading: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/alphabets-wing-touts-milestone-in-drone-deliveries/
At its busiest delivery hub, in Logan City, Australia, the company earlier this month set a new internal record of 4,500 deliveries in one week. The system will one day be a far more efficient mode of transporting goods to people’s homes than what exists today, according to a top executive.
“We’re extremely bullish on our ability to offer this service at a lower cost than ground delivery very profitably over time,” said Jonathan Bass, Wing’s head of marketing and communications. “You can begin to look at this and extrapolate to what drone delivery will look like in urban and suburban environments around the world.”
Even as government regulators in the U.S. and elsewhere hash out technical requirements for this newish class of flying machines, Wing is expanding rapidly, Bass said. In addition to its Australia test sites, it has plans for growth in Virginia and Helsinki, he said.
The potentially tectonic shift to routine deliveries of sandwiches, cups of coffee and rotisserie chicken remains a long-range goal as regulators in the U.S. and elsewhere wrestle with how to craft rules.
Continue reading: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/alphabets-wing-touts-milestone-in-drone-deliveries/
