Skip to Content
Silicon Valley

Alphabet’s Wing spinoff is about to launch drone deliveries in Finland

December 5, 2018

Alphabet’s Wing spinoff is set to launch a drone delivery service in Helsinki, Finland’s capital, in spring next year, the company has announced. It will be its first operation in Europe.

The news: It will just be a small-scale trial, with the drones only able to carry packages weighing up to 3.3 pounds (1.5 kilograms) on a round trip of up to 20 miles. Wing is pitching the drones as an environmentally friendly choice, claiming they have a carbon footprint less than a 20th that of traditional deliveries. Wing graduated from Google’s X division in July to become a separate company, after six years of development.

Drone delivery: Wing is asking Finnish would-be users what they would like to have delivered, with options including medicine, groceries, and lunch. It obviously sees Finland's interesting weather as a good testing ground, too. “If our drones can deliver here, they can deliver anywhere,” Wing says. It has spent the last 18 months trialing drone deliveries in southeastern Australia, which poses fewer challenges in that department. 

Missed deadlines: Drone deliveries have proved a lot more challenging than techies had originally thought. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos promised drone deliveries within five years in December 2013, a deadline the company won’t meet.

However … Drones have taken off (sorry) in some other sectors. The UK’s national grid uses drones to inspect overhead lines, while Minnesota’s transport department is set to deploy them to examine bridges. The tech is also increasingly being used in construction, by emergency services, and for filming and photography.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.