For those of us focused on motorcycle prices, the prospect of paying around £70,000 for a Yamaha Fazer sounds ridiculous. But for farmers in Japan, South Korea and Australia, that’s already a splendid deal — because the only thing this particular Fazer has in common with any range of past or present Yamaha powered two-wheelers is its name. The product in question is actually a 390cc fuel-injected robotic helicopter drone designed for crop-spraying.
For Yamaha, these things are suddenly topical, because the brand has just secured an exemption from US Federal Aviation Administration regulations forbiding the use of unmanned aircraft for commercial purposes for another of its robo-chopper models, the smaller RMax, thereby opening up a big potential new market. The initial target will be vineyards in California’s Napa Valley, where hilly terrain makes helicopters advantageous for spraying pesticides and fertilisers. And, of course, compact versions without pilots are hugely cheaper to operate. Yamaha then hopes to extend into Europe, at first in the similarly hilly Champagne wine region around Reims and Epernay in France.
Although Yamaha has three decades of agricultural drone development under its belt and such products now spray chemicals onto around one third of all rice grown in Japan, they remain a niche business. Selling a few hundred robo-choppers accounted for only a mere £26.4m of the company’s £8bn revenue in 2014. But it plans to double production over the next five years and gain a dominant hold on a global agricultural drone market which should have grown to about £250m by 2025. And, given there are other applications besides crop-spraying, Yamaha will be looking to tackle different aspects of an overall commercial drone sector that will be worth more than a billion quid in that time-frame.
