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from the if-the-car-sucks-as-much-as-their-vacuums...-is-that-a-good-thing? dept.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-41399497
Dyson, the engineering company best known for its vacuum cleaners and fans, plans to spend £2bn developing a "radical" electric car. The battery-powered vehicle is due to be launched in 2020. Dyson says 400 staff have been working on the secret project for the past two years at its headquarters in Malmesbury, Wiltshire.
However, the car does not yet exist, with no prototype built, and a factory site is yet to be chosen. Sir James declined to give further details of the project. "Competition for new technology in the automotive industry is fierce and we must do everything we can to keep the specifics of our vehicle confidential," he told staff in an email. Important points that are undecided or secret include the firm's expected annual production total, the cost of the car, or its range or top speed.
Sir James said about £1bn would be spent on developing the car, with another £1bn on making the battery.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by c0lo on Wednesday September 27 2017, @07:39AM (6 children)
Yiou know, vacuum cleaners and fans existed long before Dyson got into business.
And yet, you know, the Dyson products managed to bring clever innovation into the air blowing/sucking area.
This is to say: I don't discount the possibility of Dyson engineers having in their mind something that would make some difference from the current technologies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @07:51AM (4 children)
What will they make? An electric hovercar? A car that sucks and blows?
The innovation will be in design, not performance. There is nothing Dyson can bring to the table unless they can make a better and cheaper battery than the electronics giants and Tesla. Driverless isn't a radical feature for Dyson either since Tesla and Apple [wikipedia.org] will beat them to it. If the car is too expensive, they will be competing against Tesla and Apple for a smaller market instead of GM, Ford, and Toyota for mass adoption.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 27 2017, @10:45AM
Not long until 2020, almost 2 years only. I guess we'll live to see it yet.
I won't bet on level 5 driveless car [wikipedia.org] on a horizon of less than 10 years. Given the hype of "Artificial Intelligence" we've seen [soylentnews.org] lately [soylentnews.org], I might be even overly optimistic.
Besides, I enjoy driving. Even more so because I don't need to commute in a car for the last two years.
A decent range EV at a decent price (this one, I admit, is a criterion which may exclude Dyson) with no driving-assist technology would be closer on my taste.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday September 27 2017, @11:55AM (1 child)
That sounds like what people said about vacuum cleaners before Dyson came along. The technology was well established. You had a bag and a hose. You put a fan under the bag so that it would pull air through the hose, and through the bag, which then collects the dust. You can make a bigger fan, but that's about it. The thing that made Dyson successful was massive OCD. He built over a hundred prototypes before the first production model. Perhaps most interestingly, none of his techniques were actually new: the Dyson DC01 was based on mature technology that had been applied for removing particulates from factory exhausts for decades, but no one had considered trying to scale it down and apply it to a seemingly unrelated domain until Dyson. I wouldn't expect Dyson to move into a new market unless they've figured out something similar.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday September 27 2017, @02:09PM
Dyson make a washing machine.
It's INCREDIBLY expensive and prone to faults.
Dyson make a fan.
It's all fancy-schmancy but at the end of the day... it's a fan, as big as any other fan, that runs off an electric motor.
Dyson did some amazing things. But even Dyson vacuums you can look at and think "Yeah, you did that just to have the patent on that weird shaped-connector, didn't you?". The hose on the upright vacuums is a pain in the arse, especially if you're doing stairs, and you have to pick up the entire dust-bucket by a handle on top of the removable bucket, held on only by a clip, to pick the thing up.
They have some good ideas. That they have *revolutionary* ones is questionable. My Dyson is better than most vacuum cleaners, granted. But it has a lot wrong with it too. Everything else they do is about airflow and electric motors, it's probably a good industry for them. But nobody has a problem with making an electric *POWERED* car. That's easy. The aerodynamics are pretty much down to a fine art, everything else is established. The problem you have - and the ONLY problem you have, that I can see - is batteries. Just throwing a billion pounds at an age-old problem isn't necessarily going to make gains at all, especially if others are all doing the same thing in competition.
And I don't see that batteries are Dyson's area at all. Now, if someone with a big name in batteries said "We're going to spend a billion looking for better batteries", it would generate no press whatsoever.
Basically, when you can buy it, when you can hold these mythical ever-last batteries in your hands and put them in your car that you can own tomorrow, then it matters. Until then, it's all a corporate pipedream and hyperbole.
If you really thought you had something (rather than having nothing and having to go find it), then you'd keep quiet, plough in money until it was refined and they just launch to market.
If you have nothing, then what you do is tell people how much you're going to spend getting something. And that's what's happening here.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 27 2017, @12:45PM
"There is nothing Dyson can bring to the table unless they can make a better and cheaper battery than the electronics giants and Tesla."
It'll clean your driveway at the same time?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Wednesday September 27 2017, @01:11PM
c0lo wrote :-
What exactly? Bear in mind that particulate centrifuges already existed in industry. Dyson's "innovation" consists of thinking up fancy and colourful outer casings with redundant protrusions on them - I call them techno-baubles. He makes his stuff look like props in a 1950's sci-fi movie. Somehow, people are impressed by it.
BTW, my wife work for a plastics company supplying Dyson and has dealt with him directly by phone. He is a POS, and nothing like his public image.