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Dyson Will Spend $1.4 Billion, Enlist 3,000 Engineers To Build a Better Battery (digitaltrends.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: Among the 100 new products the company founder James Dyson wants to invent by 2020, the greatest investment in people and money is to improve rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, as reported by Forbes (Warning: paywalled). And Dyson is not planning incremental improvements. His opinion is that current Li-ion batteries don't last long enough and aren't safe enough -- the latter as evidenced by their propensity to spontaneously catch on fire, which is rare but does happen. Dyson believes the answer lies in using ceramics to create solid-state lithium-ion batteries. Dyson says he intended to spend $1.4 billion in research and development and in building a battery factory over the next five years. Last year Dyson bought Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Sakti3, which focuses on creating advanced solid-state batteries, for $90 million. The global lithium-ion battery market accounts for $40 billion in annual sales, according to research firm Lux as cited by Forbes. Dyson's company (which is an accurate description since he has 100-percent ownership) currently employs 3,000 engineers worldwide. He intends to hire another 3,000 by 2020. Their average age is 26. Dyson values young engineers, saying, "The enthusiasm and lack of fear is important. Not taking notice of experts and plowing on because you believe in something is important. It's much easier to do when you're young."
... also don't have to leave at 4:30 to pic their kids up in daycare.
Seriously, we need people actively looking into making those new type of batteries instead of just researching them and never do anything with the research, like we've seen for the past 5 to 10 years.
That's a lot of pretty bright people working on the materials science and the electron flow of this new device, so maybe I'll be the guy who comes up with the attention-getting label.
Better battery tech is about the most important thing in energy today, because it will let us make more use of "alternative" energy sources (you know, ones which were in use to do work long before anyone was using electricity, or building ICEs or steam turbines or even steam engines) right now. The only thing that might be even more compelling in the short term would be a safe way to store apparently physics-defying quantities of hydrogen and release small or large amounts of it later as necessary without having to expend a lot of energy to do so, but even that has less applications than a better battery.
One (okay, I) wonder[s] where battery tech would be today if EVs had remained dominant and not been pushed out by subsidized oil and coal.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And you know it's paywalled! So why using that article at all?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
It's also a lot easier to poorly re-invent wheels when you are young. I understand the sentiment that he wants young people willing to take chances but, this isn't some startup company catering to a hipster internet fad. This is an initiative to produce real world, useful products that have a potential to kill people or cause millions of dollars in property damage from fires. It would be ludicrous to focus on getting young engineers for a project like this.
I'm glad someone's working on this but, from a mid-thirties engineer, FUCK YOU Dyson.
If you thought Dyson vacuums sucked before, just wait.
Guess that is why the products tend to focus on an idea, aesthetics, and a general lack of follow-through.
Not too sure about the solid-state batteries yet, but they are getting hype...Just not sure Dyson is much of a custodian of the technology.
I sure hope for Dyson that was a question on the H1B's final exam or, well, everyone knows what the Russians say.
I dunno, better batteries sounds great, but how about just putting decent batteries that are already available in his overpriced vacuum cleaners?
I mean Jebus, the fscking $300 handheld Dyson I have doesn't even last for 15 minutes. In the mean time my Ryobi tools run for hours on a charge.
This is Edison-level of throwing anything at a wall and seeing what sticks. Apollo only required 400,000 people total. I think Apollo was more than a hundred times more complex than coming up with a battery.
On the other hand, it does show that we've really plucked all the low-hanging fruit.
FTA: “The enthusiasm and lack of fear is important,” Dyson says. “Not taking notice of experts and plowing on because you believe in something is important. It’s much easier to do when you’re young.”
I work, effectively, in this very area of materials science. I publish in journals like Nature. I have written many patents, and own several myself.
Oh, but gosh, I am not 25 years old. I am, in Dyson's "We love to fail" world, useless. Expertise, knowledge, actual experience, quick hands in the lab, and so on are of no value to them. I doubt that they'd even look at my CV. At least, in its current form... Hmmn.
Why don't I apply? I'll omit dates from my degrees, and only include the last 5 years' experience, patents, and publications. At the interview, they'll see that I'm not 25 (I look 35, but am older). They'll ask for transcripts or photocopies of degrees at some point – HR's method of engaging in age discrimination without asking "what year were you born in?". At the in-person interview, they will learn my real age. They will drop me immediately.
Then, I will sue them for age discrimination. The owner and CEO has already publicly admitted it. I don't want a job at their shitty Edison-esque "try everything" R&D facility, but rather the salary and options that I could have made had they not engaged in their already admitted age discrimination.
Sound like a good plan?
Batteries, especially solid state, are around the best possible use such a vast sum of money could be used for. I wish him all the best.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Get what you pay for!
Needs a better fan blade! 100k RPM is just nuts! MAKE IT BIGGER!
That's what she said!
Won't actually go very far with 3,000 engineers, once you factor in salary and all of the infrastructure to support 3,000 engineers. Maybe if it were $1.4B per year.
So, apparently Dyson's Sakti3 investment hasn't really panned-out...
Observation: it seems there are more places to buy refurbed Dyson vacuum cleaners and fans than there are places to buy them new. To me that suggests that they have terrible manufacturing and/or design quality, or that Dyson's marketing people have decided to charge a high price to the biters who are willing to buy a "new" Dyson vacuum cleaner or fan, and then sell "refurbs" to the unwashed masses who can't or won't buy a "new" unit.
Whatever is going on, the availability of all those refurbs has left me with an impression of poor quality. No thanks.
Damn that summary started so bright and happy, saying all sorts of things that got me excited.. and then it just got sad. I guess old people are only good for running countries. Nothing important like trying to invent batteries
Dyson values young engineers, saying, "They're cheap."
I've had one of the vacuums for years, and the only issue was the plastic piece used for storing the wand broke off.. Very happy not having to screw with bags.
but it seems pretty bold of Dyson to assume that if he throws enough people at the thing the ideas will come. I would feel better if he was starting with some promising ideas he felt worth exploring.
Nullius in verba
I'd rather he built of of those spheres
While I admire Musk for what he is accomplishing, I would not trust him with my IP. I don't think that he would out and out rip anyone off, but the deal would probably be fantastically lopsided.
With Dyson, I get the feeling that he doesn't want to rip off any engineering types as they are his people. He probably knows all the stories of where the business type and the engineer with the brilliant idea meet and somehow the engineer still can't afford a good soldering iron, yet the business type just bought his second European Ski chalet, There is no money for some new lab equipment, yet the business guy's frat boy son was able to earn enough money in his part part part part time job in the company to buy a mid line new BMW before returning to his $60,000 year school, also paid for with his summer job savings.
While the typical engineering type usually does not have a pile of business sense they do know that when they venture into this area they are swimming with sharks. I think that many just keep their heads down and don't bother getting ripped off, or they try to do it on their own and don't have the business savvy to get anywhere.
Thus I predict that a venture such as this may very well have a very positive outcome as the solution is probably sitting in some engineers mind just waiting for him to bother brining out for us to enjoy.
One other bit is: Notice the word engineer, not the word scientist. Maybe he realizes that world is bound up tighter than most bureaucracies, that throwing money into that world is basically giving boomer senior professors some more money to explore some dead end idea they have been poking at since grad school in 1973,
So they'll come up with an odd looking but definitely recognizable battery that's innovative and fairly functional, but supremely over-hyped, and will be sold for at least 5x what the battery should cost. Buyers will insist on calling it a "Dyson battery" when talking to their friends, and their wealth and modernity will be measured by how many Dyson batteries they own.
Consumer Reports will rate it 3/5.
Not taking notice of experts and plowing on because you believe in something is important. It's much easier to do when you're young
Ignorance of experience promoted as a virtue. While there, they could also skip science classes, as it may badly influence their spirits.
Here is the cost of R&D for the Saturn V vs the SLS rocket:
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=30594.0
Shows that old guys can do a rocket on a budget...
As the owner of a Dyson vacuum, I can confirm that they are one-trick ponies. Yes, the suction is incredible, but the overall design is poor, the materials are shockingly cheap, and in most respects it simply doesn't work as a vacuum cleaner. For example, on hardwood floors even the smallest specks of dirt -- the size of a crumb or smaller -- are simply pushed around the floor, instead of being sucked up by a Dyson. It's no surprise their return rate is high; I'd have returned mine, had I not gotten it free of charge from my credit card company's rewards scheme.
before they do anything else.
his fraidy-cat, don't need anything new, kids-get-off-my-lawn attitude will surely sink the company.
Absolute statements are never true
"the suction is incredible"
" the smallest specks of dirt -- the size of a crumb or smaller -- are simply pushed around the floor, instead of being sucked up"
Um....
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-spOI...
by sucking at the teat of public funds while not hiring from the same population who's paying those public funds...
All you learned there is to nit pick. Windows 3.1 was a major step forward, a step that your teacher never made and could never have made.
Possibly.
Or maybe they're one of the few vacuums that worth refurbishing (as opposed to tossing in the trash) once they reach the point where the unwashed masses think that their current one has "worn out".
...because they can pay them less while simultaneously firing older engineers who have higher pay.
Sure, then Texaco can buy them up and fuck everybody with patents. It's NiMH all over again.
Dyson AAA battery: $74.95 (ea)
Dyson AA battery: $129.95 (ea)
Dyson A battery: $229.95 (ea)
Dyson C battery: $349.95(ea)
Dyson D battery: $749.50(ea)
To quote the Dyson sales team: We charge 300 times more because our batteries last four times as long.
If it was possible, Elon Musk would have done it already.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The old nokias I had from the early '00s *DID* have much thinner batteries than my current phones (which is from 2010 and has a battery about 1/3 the size of the current large smartphones, and equivalent battery capacity for its comparative size. Li-ion hasn't improved much in capacity since overtaking NiMH 10-15 years ago. In the Nokia's case, the battery was integrated into the removable rear case of the phone, which given the plastic thickness means it was about 1/2 the thickness of my current battery and covered by about 2x the plastic the new one is. While the phone itself was much thicker, most of the components in it were not, outside of the display, keypad, and maybe some of the antenna support electronics (which I will note tended to give it much better range than the later phones. I can't remember if they were AMPS or 1st gen GSM, but I had far fewer issues with them in rugged terrain areas, something my current phone often has trouble with in what now passes for suburban areas in the foothills (having already expanded into every local plains area and begun creeping 'progress' up into the hills, all in the name of selling a few more overpriced low quality homes.
Demographers agree that we are on course to seeing the world's population maxing out and starting to fall. We can debate as to whether we will survive peak population
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga...
At least he's blatant about it.
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/type...
Real lawyers write in C++
I suppose it depends on the employment laws, but wouldn't excluding a demographic (or conversely preferentially selecting the opposite demographic) be illegal. It would come under age discrimination, in most jurisdictions that I know of.
I actually went backwards. I had a Dyson bagless back in Australia. When I moved overseas and needed to buy something while waiting for my stuff to arrive I went and got a run of the mill bagged vacuum. Not even a good one. I almost forgot how nice it is popping a bag out and putting it in the bin and not having to touch any of the stuff I just vacuumed off the floor.
I sold the Dyson when it arrived and kept the cheap vacuum. The only complain I do have, the Dyson was nicer to manoeuvre, but not that much nicer.
I bet it sucks.
I was recently shopping for a vacuum to replace a couple "brand name", upright, bagless machines acquired over the years from Walmart or similar vendors. My two main reasons for replacement were the bagless systems were very dirty- emptying them involved holding it at arm's length over a trash can, taking a deep breath, opening the trap door and dropping the dirt into the trash in a cloud of dust. The other main complaint was the noise. Jeez, those things were awful. I couldn't stand to be in the house when one of them was running. The upright design requires moving the weight of the whole machine while vacuuming- very tiring.
Given the Dyson's reputation for being a premium product, I checked into them. Bagless- ugh! And on-line reviews by both pros and consumers said they were noisy as all get-out. And then there were all those refurbs...
I eventually settled on a Miele C4. It's very quiet, cannister type (much easier to use because you don't have to keep moving the weight of an upright back and forth), uses bags that close themselves up when you take them out of the machine. The air rushing through the nozzles makes more noise than the motor unit. My cats will sit undisturbed while I vacuum until the nozzle is within 1 m of them, then they just move out of the way.
I've been doing a lot more vacuuming since I got the Miele. It is hard to believe it can move as much air as it does an be so quiet.
Wasnt I reading about a ready solid lithium battery not more then a week ago? Why not just buy that
I have owned a couple of Dyson vacuum cleaners, and I found them to be heavy, expensive, unwieldy, garish and clean no better than those from other companies. Part of their weight comes from their ridiculous attempts at looking "high tech", with numerous unnecessary nooks and crannies that make them harder to wipe down.
Contrary to what he likes to imply, Dyson didn't invent the cyclonic vacuum; they've been around since 1928. The first bladeless fan came from Toshiba in 1981. The success of Dyson's company seems to be mostly due to taking existing ideas, putting a futuristic-looking design around them, and then marketing the hell out of them.
So, I wouldn't really go to Dyson for advice on what makes a good engineer; Dyson was never an engineer himself, and the products he designs are neither particularly novel nor (arguably) particularly well engineered. They are "well designed", in the commercial sense that their gimmicks and unusual appearance attract many buyers, not necessarily in the sense that they function well. But a well engineered bagless vacuum would be lightweight, easy to wipe down, and cheap, in addition to functioning reasonably well and not being an eye sore.
These days, Dyson seems to spend a lot of time throwing his political and legal weight around.
Don't forget overpriced. And there just aren't any discounts anywhere on those items (vacuums or fans). The vacuums are just made of plastic, so they are not built to last (just like their engineers). Their "bladeless" fans are a curiosity, but upon close inspection, there is a fan in the base of it that has, well, blades! I would have been more impressed if it was more like the ionic breeze air filter that uses electricity only to move the air.
Maybe he will succeed at making a breakthrough in battery technology, but if it's like his other products, it will be too expensive. What good is a cell phone battery that lasts all week when it costs $400?
> you don't have to keep moving the weight of an upright back and forth
how is the weight of upright v.s. "flat" design different, all things being equal, including weight?
I agree they're not much good on a smooth floor, but I use a broom for that. They work very well in that environment. We've had a Dyson for a long time and aside from eating its skinny little belts trivially if you clog it with hair, it's a very good machine for us. And it pulls stuff out of the carpet that other vacs don't, which is its mission...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Aside from campaigning for the UK to leave the EU, he closed down his UK factory some years ago and moved it to Malaysia. We may be fairly certain that these '3000' jobs won't be created in the UK, the EU or the US as he doesn't much like paying the going rate for western engineers when he can get them for ten-a-penny in the Far East.
And his vacuum cleaners are noisy, over-priced and they don't last.
It is rather surprising that this moron ever got anything done and apparently what he got done was not nearly as good as the press thinks it is.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They see you fucking moles, get rope, back up truck, tie to bumper and your neck.
Mother fuck you.
Their bagless system on the DC54 is worse than that. I have one and a long haired large dog. When emptying the thing all the dust & hair sits in a bagless system that is less than 1cm wide around the engine. I have to get my fingers in there and pull it out, or use the shroud cleaner. After emptying I have to wash my hands, every time. This was the 'Animal' version too, but it looks like it was fixed in the next version with a sort of push/eject feature...
I actually went backwards. I had a Dyson bagless back in Australia. When I moved overseas and needed to buy something while waiting for my stuff to arrive I went and got a run of the mill bagged vacuum. Not even a good one. I almost forgot how nice it is popping a bag out and putting it in the bin and not having to touch any of the stuff I just vacuumed off the floor.
I sold the Dyson when it arrived and kept the cheap vacuum. The only complain I do have, the Dyson was nicer to manoeuvre, but not that much nicer.
Yep, if I'm going to have the hassle of emptying a bag-less vacuum I might as well just use a cheap shop-vac for the job.
Like all Dyson products, these batteries will suck.
Because you don't shift the canister around when you move the wand back and forth - the hose is long enough to clean a respectable area arount the base unit before shifting it - once - to the next general area. And you only deal with the weight of the hose and wand, not the entire machine. Can you picture designing a shop vac as an upright?
My point about "refurbs" was that maybe they aren't really refurbs. Maybe they're a second pricing tier for new vacuums to be sold to the "poor" and cheapskates. Refurbs come with reduced warranty and probably less fancy packaging that makes for a "cheaper" user experience. If they sold as new the people who paid full retail would get pissed off and stop buying them for the premium price.
How's the noise level? Reviews I've seen of Dyson vacuums say they are as noisy as the cheapo Dirt Devils, and similar budget machines.
When vacuuming hard floors you don't want a carpet beater brush spinning- the vacuum will suck the dirt into the brush which will then fling it all over the floor instead of depositing it into the maw of the machine.
You do realize that you paid for it- credit card companies are not in the habit of giving things away.
Which is why pretty much every vacuum on the planet can turn the brush spin off.
These two statements are not contradictory. The suction is indeed incredible -- but ONLY on carpet. On hardwood floors, the design simply does not work, and much of the dirt isn't sucked up.
And even with the brush spin turned off, a high-end Dyson vacuum will simply push the dirt around the room.
Yes, however I personally have paid not one cent of interest or fees on the credit card the entire time I've had it. The fees are tacked on at the register, and since the law doesn't allow charging a surcharge for a credit card, that means I'd have paid for it even if I used cash and never had a rewards program in the first place. Ergo I might as well take advantage of getting the reward for free, since the end cost to me is identical but I end up with an expensive product whose cost I wouldn't have been able to justify otherwise.
fucking ageist.