Skip to Content
Smart cities

Uber says it will start delivering McDonald’s by drone this summer

An artist's impression of what Uber's delivery drone will look like
An artist's impression of what Uber's delivery drone will look likeUber

It has a few hurdles to overcome before the service launches, though.

The news: Uber Elevate, the company’s aerial arm, has said it will start delivering meals from McDonald’s and other local restaurants to households in San Diego this summer, Bloomberg reports. It will cost the same as a standard Uber Eats delivery but should eventually be quicker, Uber said.

But: Uber is still waiting for approval from the Federal Aviation Administration for the service. The company has promised it’ll be offering food deliveries by drone in multiple countries by 2023 (though it said 2021 last year, so take that with a pinch of salt).

Also, to be honest, the trial delivery process sounds a bit tortuous. Rather than delivering to your home, the drones will fly to designated zones, where couriers will pick up the goods and deliver them to your door.

Uber takes to the skies: It’s betting on a future where people not only want their food to travel by drone, but also fancy traveling that way themselves. Yesterday, Reuters reported that Melbourne, Australia, will be the third test site for Uber’s planned flying taxi service. The service will transport passengers from one of seven shopping centers in the city to its main international airport. The 19-kilometer trip should take 10 minutes, rather than the 25 minutes it normally takes by car.

Sign up here to our daily newsletter The Download to get your dose of the latest must-read news from the world of emerging tech.

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.