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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.'"
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.
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.
It would be ludicrous to focus on getting young engineers for a project like this.
Not to mention that it's an offensively age-ist thing to do.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
If you thought Dyson vacuums sucked before, just wait.
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?
Look what a bunch of very young engineers pulled off almost 50 years ago (apollo)
Here is a picture of those young engineers; http://history.nasa.gov/SP-410...
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?
Professor John Goodenough demonstrated the first Lithium Ion battery at the age of 57, and continued to lead battery development efforts for decades.
The primary advantage of young engineers is that they are cheap and disposable. That's not to say that young engineers are necessarily bad engineers. I've met plenty of 22 year old rockstars that I've enjoyed working with and have even learned from. But, when you explicitly state that you want to hire young engineers, it can actually be re-phrased as, "We want a cheap, disposable workforce that, hopefully, with time, will throw enough shit at the wall that some of it might stick".
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.
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.
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!
I'd rather he built of of those spheres
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.
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.
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
It's also a lot easier to poorly re-invent wheels when you are young.
Well that fits the profile of his company, which he built on not understanding the physics of a cyclone separator and infamously trial and erroring till he got it to work. Or copying a fanless blade design from a 20 year old Toshiba patent and then trial an errored different patent submissions until the patents office accidentally accepted the idea as original.
Expect to hear him invent some battery chemistry which we have covered on slashdot before.
was his name Bobby, by any chance?
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.'"
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."