Q500 Yuneec quadcopter: lagging behind in design and performance

Yuneec China first hit the headlines with its efforts to challenge consumer UAV market leader DJI when it launched its Q500 4k Yuneec quadcopter model.

That was in 2015, well before the launch of a Yuneec drone with an Intel RealSense module. Even if you discount the absence of a serious obstacle avoidance feature, just the mere product design of the Yuneec quadcopter left a lot of unanswered questions.

There were a number of things to question about the quality of the build.

First was the inconvenient size and layout of the flight controller. And through the layout of the control unit, you can draw a conclusion that the Yunec quadcopter was essentially using the same control unit that Yuneec China, a former OEM manufacturer, had used in manufacturing the Horizon Hobby.

Second, the Yuneec quadcopter build design and placement of the joints and shoulders looked odd.  These, along with the random wiring and sensor placement, for those who truly know, made it clear that Yuneec was trying to seize market share without paying great attention to quality.

And you can’t forget the fact that the Q500 Yuneec quadcopter went through two large-scale recalls in North America and Europe. The root cause, according to reviews on sites like DroneCompares, was that the Yuneec quadcopter was experiencing an unacceptable level of vibration of the gimbal. Luckily, the Yuneec quadcopter development team found a way to fix this product failure, but it shouldn’t have occurred in the first place. The firm has ceased production of the Q500 Yuneec quadcopter, with total sales reaching around 100,000 units.

According to people familiar with this Yuneec quadcopter launch events in the US, retailers received a handsome shares of the revenue from each unit sold to carry and push the Yuneec drone.

Taking a close and systematic look at what’s inside this particular Yuneec quadcopter, such a strategy surely brought initial success in opening up a distribution network for Yuneec, but it’s fair to say the Q500 was a premature product. What sounded like an early challenge in the DJI vs Yuneec contest, turned out to be a failed attempt thanks to the poor design and inept performance of this Yuneec quadcopter.

The fact that Yuneec claims to have a large R&D team and regularly tries to poach engineers from other UAV drone manufacturers, doesn’t resonate with the unacceptably low build quality of the Q500 Yuneec quadcopter. The poor performance of this Yuneec quadcopter was simply a warning sign that it could never match the DJI Phantom 3, either from the standpoint of exterior design or internal layout. And, of course, after DJI launched the latest version of the Phantom series, virtually every DJI Phantom 4 Pro review made it clear that it was simply a much better product, burying with it any hopes for Yuneec to offer a formidable challenge.

The key to success in the UAV drone industry lies in the details. That’s where the Yuneec quadcopter Q500 – or its successor hexacopter the Typhoon H – lags behind, as it is clear in any DJI vs Yuneec comparison.

 

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