Autel’s “Mavic-killer” EVO II drone release gets pushed back to March after bug discovery

There’s been quite a bit of hype surrounding Autel’s three new drones in the Autel EVO II series. Designed to compete directly with DJI’s range of Mavic drones, the EVO II comes in three flavours, two of which can shoot 8K 10-Bit video (one of these has a thermal camera, too) and another which has a relatively massive 1″ 6K sensor.

But Autel has told DPReview that the drones will “likely be pushed back to a March release”. Originally we were told to expect a release “in a few weeks”, but after a preproduction bug presented itself, the release has been delayed.

Autel emailed a statement to DPReview, which they also shared to their social media accounts, which says that the big “could limit flight performance under normal operation”. Exactly what that implies could be anything, really. The complete statement reads as follows…

Hello Everyone!

First, we want to thank all of our fans and followers. It doesn’t matter if you just follow one of our social channels, or if you fly our products every day. Your support and enthusiasm have always kept us going here at the Seattle office.

With the announcement of EVO II at CES, the response has been absolutely crazy. This community is exploding, and we thank you for your patience with us as we are still trying to catch up on responses. We also want to be as transparent as possible and give you all periodic updates on the status and availability of EVO II. That way you have the most up to date information straight from us and not just rumors.

Our goal at CES was to get the initial units of EVO II (8k) into the hands of dealers by the end of January. Unfortunately, during production, we found a bug in our software that could limit flight performance under normal operation. Instead of shipping the hardware with a known issue and forcing users to perform day 1 updates, we have decided to delay the rest of production and shipments until we have resolved the issue. Our projected timeline is to have EVO II available for purchase in March. This is not a set date or time frame, and things can always change. But with the information we have today, that is our goal.

The team in Seattle is very small and we are adding channel support as we can. We are looking to start up our website newsletter again in the next few weeks. So for any future updates, please check our website, the official social channels, and emails coming directly from us.

We thank you for your patience. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to get a hold of us at support@autelrobotics.com

Thank you all again and fly safe!

Whatever the problem is, Autel felt it prudent to resolve the issue before shipping out the cameras, rather than ship them out now and push an update at some point for users to install. That’s quite an uncommon, but welcome, approach from a manufacturer these days. Most would just push it out anyway and then try to fix it later.

[via DPReview]