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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."
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.'"
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.
You need both science and engineering, hopefully in a collaborative atmosphere where they are willing to talk about the challenges to make a piratical solution, then figure out how to overcome them. Basic research is more pure science, and applied research becomes more engineering. If they already have some basic research products that they intend to move in applied research, then they'll need engineers. It appears they have some basic technological approach in mind.
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?
They may be good at coming up with some things but their implementation sucks.
I bought one of their tower fans for my bedroom. The infrared sensor for the remote is at the bottom of the unit so I had to sit up and reach my arm up in order for the remote to be in line with the sensor. It would also be a problem if any room with furniture in the way. Put the sensor at the top of the fan so it can be easily be seen by the remote.
The other big thing that bugged me about that fan was that it didn't remember if the oscillation was turned on or not. When you turned on the fan you always had to turn on the oscillation. I had bought the fan for $350 on sale and when you charge that much it should remember the state it was in when the fan was turned off. It remembered the power level. I have a 14 year old $50 fan that remembers if it was turning back and forth but a fan that costs hundreds more than the next expensive one doesn't.
I wrote the company about it and they said that's how it was designed. Well, they need someone to look at the user design of their products. I told Dyson that that I won't be buying any of their products because the human interface was flawed and I took the fan back to the store.
You not kidding... When I took cs back in the 90s my data structures teacher one day went on a yelling tirade on how windows 3.1 was a step backwards in design, then proceeded to backup his statements for the whole class. good times.
I was teaching a kid SQL and he fell into an issue where his joins and where when he gave up and asked why he wasn't getting the proper results.
So I sketched the answer on a whiteboard in less than two minutes and explained how his joins and cases were excluding the data he wanted. He spent a few days on the issue trying to figure it out on his own.
When he asked me how the hell I figured out so fast I told him that I ran into the issue years ago and simply asked someone with experience.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
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,