Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
but that's not the job of engineers, it's the job of the science, first, and *only then* do engineers come into play to wonder whether the process is tangible and could be commercialized. If I'm not mistaken, we already know plenty of battery tech, but they are not commercially viable (either unsafe, or process don't scale, etc.).
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...
That and they have less to loose in case of failure. So they are willing to take more risks and perhaps get bigger rewards. Having a family while personally rewarding forced you to play it safer as failure will effect more than themselves.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
Also a lot of engineers that you can fire or layoff without causing shareholders to notice.
I don't know how good Dyson is good with HR. But those comments make it sound like it may be a tough job to keep.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
That's right! That's why my cell phone which uses more power than my cell phone of 10 years ago with a battery less than a third the size lasts significantly longer - because everyone's been "never doing anything with the research", right?
Good research results make news. Their employment in commercial products generally doesn't.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
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.
balanced out by not having a sense of responsibility, but hey, let's not keep score.
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.
And ripe pickin's for an age discrimination lawsuit.
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
It is said that Microsoft in the early days hired only young fresh software engineers so they wouldn't be corrupted by "old school" thinking.
These engineers went on to build software that re-created every mistake in the book about how and OS should be designed and implemented.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Maybe he did mean loose as if your lose your job, you might have to turn your family loose if you can't afford to feed them anymore.
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.
No one is wondering... It's because of education. People see a lot more to life and kids hinder ones ability to enjoy a lot of those things.
That's probably a good thing too in general since automation will replace a lot of low skilled jobs.
I'll agree with your sentiment, if not your particular example. My old flip-phone from 10 years ago lasted about a week on a single charge. Obviously, though, that's because it was doing jack-crap processing-wise compared to the mini-supercomputers we now all have in our pockets, not due to a lack of progress in battery tech. I think many tech-types have just been spoiled by Moore's Law, not realizing how abnormal it is for technology to improve on an exponential scale.
Anyhow, I'm always glad to see more research into this field. A lot of our current tech is tethered to battery life, and batteries are, I think, going to be more and more important as we transition more toward renewable energy for much of our everyday power needs.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
It's not a public company, there are no shareholders. Just an owner.
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.
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
What and looser that guy is!
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!
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.
Oh, cool, that puts it much more into perspective. With an average age of 26, I imagine that they have equal representation between 46 year olds and 6 year olds.
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
As someone who has one of their vacuums: Fuck their over-complicated designs and their plastic, plastic, plastic everything.
Hell, they didn't even put a suitable cord on the thing. It gets blazingly hot in just a few minutes of use. It's also the most tangle-prone cord of all time.
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,
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.
That and they have less to loose in case of failure. So they are willing to take more risks and perhaps get bigger rewards. Having a family while personally rewarding forced you to play it safer as failure will effect more than themselves.
Anyone with a foot out the door of the company they are working for is in the same boat. Once I realized that the company needs me more than I need them, I was a lot more willing to stand up to management and forcefully push for needed changes. I just didn't care if I lost at that point since I wasn't planning on sticking around.
I have been assigned a lot more responsibility since then. Maybe that's what it takes to be in management- boldness on the edge of recklessness.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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
Even better, they will stay till 4:30am...
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 fully funded
Fixed.
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
I'm guessing either a spellcheck created "piratical" in your sentence or you were talking about needing both science and IP lawyers, not engineers.
Depends on which country he employs them in.
He must plan on hiring some pretty stupid engineers if it takes 3000 of them to design a battery.
These engineers went on to build software that re-created every mistake in the book about how and OS should be designed and implemented.
Microsoft had a client OS that ran on the hardware-challenged commodity PCs of the early eighties and nineties --- not a trivial achievement. It's future was not dependent on the success or failure of any single computer manufacturer --- and in the early days it presented a plausible and relatively straight-forward upgrade path from CP/M.
It is said that Microsoft in the early days hired only young fresh software engineers so they wouldn't be corrupted by "old school" thinking
Or maybe the real reason is 'not having old/other school experience prevents the new engineers from comparing, seeing and reporting weaknesses in Microsoft structure/dev teams'.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I have been assigned a lot more responsibility since then. Maybe that's what it takes to be in management- boldness on the edge of recklessness.
You're halfway there. Add a lack of knowledge of the scope of the problems but the willingness to throw out the latest buzzwords and you're a shoo-in for the C-suite.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
we need people actively looking into making those new type of batteries instead of just researching them and never do anything with the research
You haven't been paying attention.
Like photovoltaic solar panels (which can now be had for under a dollar a watt WITHOUT subsidies, more than an order of magnitude improvement over the last decade or so), DEPLOYED battery technology has been improving, drastically.
Of course most of the breakthroughs don't get deployed. That's usually because better breakthroughs come along before they get that far.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
But how many years of process shrinks, improved LEDs, better radios, higher capacity batteries, etc., has it been since that flip phone was made? If manufacturers were chasing battery life, instead of biggest screen, thinnest phone and fastest processor, we could easily have smartphones running for several days between charges. Charging your phone twice a day has become the new normal, so nobody returns their power-hungry phones, and it's not prominently advertised, so manufacturers don't expect more sales from improving upon run-time and don't bother.
Think of it like web search engines just before Google came along... Everybody sucks equally, and one disruptive innovator jumping in could wipe the floor with everybody else.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
If it was possible, Elon Musk would have done it already.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Atari, Apple, Acorn and Commodore managed it too.
It'll certainly be harder to work on new tech with only one eye and a hook for a hand
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 bought a Dyson DC01 when they where first released, it was an excellent vacuum cleaner probably around 1993/1994 after two years the motor failed, I rang the company up to see how much a repair would cost and they fixed it for free.
Around 2004 we replaced it with a DC07 which we are still using.
The company projects a good ethos and talks about the importance of engineering. A+ will buy again eventually.
Shoudn't he should commit to his belief in young engineers and replace himself as head of the company with a 26 year old, then? Unless he is the only exception to the older-lack-of-enthusiasm-and-much fear thing he claims is inherent...
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.
was his name Bobby, by any chance?
Have you ever used a Dyson product? They suck (except the ones that are supposed to).
Good news that this little battery company had its own R&D staff, perhaps some of them who've had some life experience. If they just need a billion dollars to succeed, then I'm all for it and hope Dyson profits handsomely.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I've got 2 - a hoover which is excellent and a blade-less fan which is also excellent. So I have no fucking clue what you're talking about.
And you wanted "affect", not "effect".
Maybe not.
"Windows 3.1 was a major step forward..."
A lot of other Windows 10 users also came to this conclusion, but ran up against the very limited device driver support in 3.1 . Most of them are now back on Windows 7.
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?
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.
The solar panels could be free, it doesn't really matter, because the other parts aren't getting cheaper.
Labor, inverters, wiring, permits, etc. cost more than the panels do.
You could give me 10kw of panels free and it still wouldn't make sense to put them up.
Any battery developed by Dyson will no doubt be massively overpriced like their other products. Even if he were able to double the energy density of batteries, it seems likely you would be able to buy several of the conventional batteries for the same price.
Besides which, it looks like there is already quite a breakthrough happening right now. http://news.mit.edu/2016/lithi...
Boss: "I'm sorry Captain Hook, we have to let you go. It seems you have passed our age limit and Susan who sits next to you keeps complaining about click clacking all day coming from your cubical. She has submitted several sexual harassment claims, claiming you ripped her shirt and bra while patting her on the back. Tough break."
Hook: "Arrghhhhhh the life of a pirate be hard matey"
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.
More of the breakthroughs get out into the wild than you would believe. You don't get 20% more capacity at the same weight in 5 years without it. Lithium Ion battery innovations are deployed almost immediately if they are economical and capable of mass production. It's the new battery techs being developed that have a much lower success rate. Very few have ended up competitive with lithium with the advances being done in Lithium. They target being better and cheaper than Lithium but in 5 years the Lithium batteries outpace the development.
The money Dyson is planning to spend is pennies in comparison to what is being expended right now on batteries. There are hundreds of companies both startups and large industrial conglomerates spending more. There are 10's of billions being spent on battery research right now, it wouldn't surprise me if the total R&D exceeded 100 billion or more. Lithium batteries alone have seen gains of more than 20% in 5 years time and there are a dozen different battery chemistries being deployed for various applications given the constraints to drive battery success (weight, charge rate, discharge rate, total capacity, size, life and cost). Lithium has been dominating because it does very well at all the constraints except the charge cycles (life).
Are those the ones where you draw a Ford Transit overlapping a Citroen Nemo?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Like all Dyson products, these batteries will suck.
The rewards are a one time bonus for the employee, but a lifetime bonus for the owner.
Why should an employee only settle for a one-time reward. Don't give me "Risk" as an answer. What is risk when there is money always coming in and the research is a tax writeoff.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
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.
A Van Diagram shows the intersection of boxes and cars.
http://mentalfloss.com/sites/d...
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.
Here is a secret. Private companies have shareholders too. Sometimes it is just the bank giving them a loan. However it would be any group of people paying him before a product is produced.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.