Where is the US or EU competitor to DJI? They are running away with it. Oh right, we instead pioneered regulation and legislation, all those deaths from drones falling down and drones hitting planes.
Do it after someone dies: "Why didn't you do anything?!"
It's not insane to get out in front of drone regulation; their numbers are likely to continue to increase. Lack of regulation certainly isn't DJI's advantage; they still have to comply with it to sell their product in a whole bunch of major markets. That's the exact reason this drone weighs 249 grams.
Nor is it surprising. There are a lot of regulations around aviation (though perhaps not as many as there are in other places) and safety is the reason. Every flying object in the sky is sharing the space with commercial airliners, hobbyist pilots, logistics companies, government aircraft, etc. All of which share the same regulations or have specific ones depending on the industry. It makes sense that drones would be regulated as well.
See the other reply upthread with respect to line of sight ("You're not allowed to use binoculars.") If true, that's stupid and unnecessary.
Same reason sniper teams like to have someone on overwatch who isn’t zoomed into a target.
In reality, rules this stupid simply get ignored with impunity. Which is fine by me.
If it's consumer marker where less cost matters a lot, there won't be a US competitor. DJI has home-turf, scale, and first mover advantage there, and a US competitor can maaybe match DJI in price.
In technology/autonomy? Skydio beat them years ago (https://www.skydio.com/). They launched as a consumer drone but I guess recently realized how consumer market in west isn't as profitable as enterprise/defense market so they shut down their consumer division. Skydio founders were pioneers in autonomous aerial vehicles, and it's not surprising they beat everyone else in autonomy. When they launched their first drone a few years ago, they were doing outdoor vision based autonomy for drone using on board compute only - it's an insanely hard problem, especially when you want to do in reliably in a product and not in a lab setting for nice videos. They did it and blew everyone away. DJI fan boys will say 'oh but DJI had autonomy too'. No they didn't, at best they had feedback based obstacle avoidance.
I often tell my friends, one of my biggest regret was not signing up for an internship at Skydio back in 2018. They came to UIUC for recruiting, and they didn't realize their product yet. Back then I was a dumb first year grad student, I didn't check the founders background, and naively thought it was yet another dumb drone company trying to get some VC money by pitching something they'd obviously fail it. I've never been so wrong.
In technology, hell no.
Admittedly, Skydio had this pretty good VSLAM a few years ago. Still their drone was pretty useless in most use-cases where you would have taken a DJI. In many situations you don't really need more than "sense-and-avoid". Don't under-estimate DJI. The day VSLAM is important, they may have it much faster than you think.
It's a common mistake in the West to think that "we are better at technology than China". In the drone industry, we are years behind. And because of the technology, not because of the production cost.
> I've never been so wrong.
Well they have been struggling like the rest of the Western drone industry, it's not exactly a serious competitor to DJI. I would say that back in the days, Parrot was more successful than Skydio ever was. Since then I would think that the Anafi competes with Skydio (again they don't have the Skydio VSLAM, but who most use-cases don't need that).
Subsidies and regulation played a major role here, although probably not the same kinds the parent post is whining about.
The US government and enterprise market requires drones which are compatible with US Federal requirements ("Blue UAS") as well as state-by-state bans on DJI drones. It's a lot easier to compete in a space where your primary competition is being made illegal.
GoPro started IIRC as a company that just branded cameras they ordered from overseas.
What about zipline? There's also some other startups focusing more on use of drones rather than building drones from ground-up.
DJI is a video camera company that happens to put the cameras on drones.
To be honest, we were far, far behind DJI waaaaay before we started talking about regulation and legislation. And since then we have not really been catching up at all.