Why Current Drone Design Lacks Elegance (alt title: Why the Model T Failed)

An introduction to Gabor Paulke, Chief Design Officer at Modovolo. 

It’s an often quoted maxim from Elon Musk: “The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist.”

We’d like to attach the “Design Addendum” to it: “The second most common error is to have an engineer design a product.” 

This isn’t a dig on engineers. We have many of them at Modovolo. And they are awesome. Well, most of them. Some of them are VW and Audi fan-boys so you know they have questionable taste in cars. 

Speaking of cars, we are all familiar with the fact that car companies have car designers. (Well, except at Subaru. We’re not sure if they have designers there.)

And those car designers…design cars to look and feel amazing to the senses. Because more than anything else, the car’s design is what drives car sales. 

It’s a lesson that car companies (except Subaru) learned way back in the 1920s. 

We’ve talked about the Ford Model T and its spectacular success in democratizing transportation. Prior to the Model T, cars were hand built in low volumes and so were outrageously expensive (equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars in today’s money). The Model T brought the cost down so everyone could afford it - equivalent to a few thousands dollars in today’s money. 

But the Model T had a draw back. It was boring and utilitarian. Like it was designed by an engineer. 

Then along came General Motors. It’s likely surprising to us now but GM became a behemoth by designing cars that were…designed. By a car designer. 

So by the end of the 1920s, Model T sales started to drop precipitously because GM had introduced car designs that were gorgeous and, after nearly 20 years of the Model T, people wanted more than just boring and utilitarian. 

And not only did GM take market share from Ford, GM was able to charge a premium for their mass-produced cars because of their design. 

We’ve seen this play out in other industries. Apple’s computers have pretty much the same components as most PC computer manufacturers (or even lower-performance components) but Apple charges 50% or more. How? It’s all in the design. The look and feel of an Apple product is just better. And customers will pay a premium for that.  

These aren’t isolated occurrences limited to just GM and Apple. It has been proven that design matters in driving revenue. A lot.  

In 2018, the famous consulting firm McKinsey released their “Business Value of Design” study, which tracked ~300 publicly listed companies over a five-year period, across multiple industries (consumer goods, retail banking, medical devices) and looked at >2 million pieces of financial data and over 100,000 “design actions” (i.e., measurable decisions or practices around design) by those companies, something McKinsey called the “Design Index.” 

Companies in the top quartile for design (the highest performers on the Design Index) had ~32% higher revenue growth over five years compared to industry peers. 

So what does this have to do with drones? 

In a prior article Toilets and Drones, we’ve talked about how current drone design is, well, lame. Actually, we used a clever dad-joke pun of, “shitty.” The basic premise in that article was that the design of toilets hasn’t changed much in the last 200 years just like drone design today. 

And this is why drone design lacks elegance. Because the design formula for current drones for the last 15 years is this: engineer a center area for avionics and payload, connect four rods, and then attach motors and propellers to those rods. Done. Plus any payloads other than cameras always feel like afterthoughts strapped to the landing gear.

But it’s here where the world of drones wasn’t expecting the advent of Gabor Paulke, a legendary product designer who has worked on the interior of the Airbus A380 double decker jumbo jet, the iRobot Roomba and Scooba, and many other products for blue chip companies like DELL, EMC, Amazon, General Electric. 

Gabor joined Modovolo in December 2024 just as Modovolo was about to start down the path of designing its first production version of the Lift. And this was just about the time that Modovolo was about to violate the Design Addendum. 

“Arion, our CTO and lead engineer, had designed something very special that could fly for hours and that cost very little to build. But it wasn’t a product,” explains Gabor. “It was very much a prototype.”

“And while it was very rugged in many ways, you had to be very careful where you picked it up and it was difficult to do simple things like change the battery,” continues Gabor.

Gabor then started down the path of re-thinking the drone utilizing the lessons learned from Arion’s prototypes. But there was a significant learning curve. 

“I had never been in a product development project where every gram was counted. That was different.” 

“My first designs were very heavy and this led to Arion and me butting heads about the importance of design versus weight savings. It turns out we are both right so the ultimate solution though is to do both!” 

The result is the Modovolo Lift. 

“It almost looks sinister, like a Klingon Bird of Prey from Star Trek. And it has a sound profile unlike anything else I’ve ever heard,” explained Gabor.  

“And this design has so many benefits. It's very light yet far stronger than a standard drone design. And we can manufacture it at a fraction of the cost of other drone companies,” said Gabor.  

But the biggest change of all is the Lift’s payload-centric design. 

“All the drones on the planet have a fixed center with all of the avionics and batteries - and some sort of attachment point to connect the payload from the bottom. You could see that it's difficult for drone operators to attach a payload there plus it is very limiting to what kind of payloads it could carry. We knew that we had to fix that problem.”

The solution is “negative space.” The entire middle area of the Lift is available for payload.

“It’s a complete re-think of how to do drone design around the payload,” continues Gabor. “Any payload can be just dropped in from above. It’s super easy. And the area is massive. It can accommodate nearly anything you’d want to carry.”

In the end, Gabor Paulke didn’t just redesign a drone—he rewrote the rules for what drones should be. Where others saw four rods and a payload mount, he saw negative space and possibility. The result is the Modovolo Lift: part engineering marvel, part design statement, and entirely unlike anything else in the sky. It’s light, it’s tough, it’s affordable—and yes, it looks a little bit like something a Klingon might fly to work.

And that’s the point. Because design isn’t about polishing what already exists—it’s about imagining what should. With Gabor at the helm of Modovolo’s design future, the era of boring, utilitarian drones might just be coming to an end.