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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."
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.
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?
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.
My Tesla is a far superior driving experience than any ICE car I have ever owned (i.e. Porsche, Audi, etc.). It is faster, quieter, smoother, better handling. Better in every way. There is no way I will ever buy an ICE car again.
The subsidy was a very small percentage of the cost and was not a factor in the purchase.
Whatever you do, don't take a Tesla test drive. It will make you hate your slow, noisy, polluting ICE car forever.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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."