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Vacuum Company Dyson To Build 'Radically Different' Electric Car (theguardian.com)
British inventor Sir James Dyson has announced plans to build an electric car that will be "radically different" from current models and go on sale in 2020. The Guardian reports: The billionaire who revolutionized the vacuum cleaner said 400 engineers in Wiltshire had been working since 2015 on the 2.5 billion British pound project. No prototype has yet been built, but Dyson said the car's electric motor was ready, while two different battery types were under development that he claimed were already more efficient than in existing electric cars. Dyson said consumers would have to "wait and see" what the car would look like: "We don't have an existing chassis [...] We're starting from scratch. What we're doing is quite radical." However, he said the design was "all about the technology" and warned that it would be an expensive vehicle to purchase. While he did not name a price, he said: "Maybe the better figure is how much of a deposit they would be prepared to put down."
totally suck!
Kinda catchy.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Where the hell is my sphere, Dyson?
After investing 2.5 billion GBP already, I sure hope it doesn't suck. The expectation to deliver must be hanging over James Dyson's head like a bowling ball.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I sure hope it's easier to use than their vacuum cleaner. The thing folds up in such an odd way I had to re-figure it out several times.
I'll wait for Electrolux's entry into the market.
Nothing sucks like Electrolux.
I've only owned two vacuum cleaners in my life and both were Electrolux. The first I inherited and was about 50 years before the motor died out. The newer one still sucks.
Unfortunately the new one is not backwards-compatible with the bags the old one used.
you met that sweet, vitamin C infused, head-high-to-Dinklage produce with all the zeal of a baby seal club-wielder.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Wanna bet? Maybe it will be a modern reincarnation of Jim Hall's Chaparral 2J.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
If you can afford to spend $500 on a Dyson vacuum cleaner, I got some prime beach front property in Florida you can buy.
if they can make a self driving car that can work year round in the Chicago area then may have something big.
Considering the Dyson hairdryer costs $400, and a Dyson table fan costs $300, I predict the Dyson Car will cost $5 million dollars.
Better known as 318230.
I wish him success. It'd be wonderful to have a new Tesla-like operation running (in the sense of a new purely-electric vehicle company). But the smart money is on this project utterly failing. There is a huge amount of technical and marketing expertise involved in designing something as complex as a car. If he's coming into this without involving a lot of people really experienced with all aspects of car development, the chances are really good that the project will be doomed to failure. Plus there's the whole manufacturing problem to tackle. Bringing a new car assembly line into production would be monumental, and even contracting with an existing manufacturer for this purpose would be extremely challenging (especially if the differences from existing car designs are substantial, as Dyson apparently wants to achieve).
And if the car is too different from existing designs, he's going to have a hell of a time convincing people to buy it.
I was playing with motors for a solar car project in college (World Solar Challenge) in he early 90's that were 97% efficient.
It will look good, be marketed up the ying-yang, be priced higher than more reliable models from other manufacturers, and repair people will hate it because of all the cheap plastic parts and the fact that reliability and repair ability took a back seat to looks and other "gee whiz" features.
Oh wait, this article is about a Dyson CAR.
You know that company's track record. Even when their prior products worked as designed and advertised, they sucked.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Wouldn't it be more beneficial for them to work with companies that are already producing electric cars? Instead of trying to develop an entire car, how about producing and perfecting their electric motor. Be the supplier to Tesla; seems like it would help Tesla get their cars out faster. With that capital, produce, supply and perfect the batteries. Then other components one by one until they produce the entire car.
-USR1
It will weigh 99,000 lbs, and have 12 mile electrical cord which you manage by wrapping it around 2 pegs on the hood.
Also, it will cost 4x what other cars cost.
Steve Balmer said essentially the same thing about Apple and cell phones... there's no reason why a new entrant cannot hit a car out the park. There are zillions or car tinkerers in the world that understand cars incredibly well, so it's not like there's not a lot of available expertise with cars nor are car issues not incredibly well understood already. Car evolution has been incredibly slow to date, the market is absolutely ripe for ANYONE with some nice technical improvements to steal a ton of marketshare away from larger auto makers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Instead of artificial intelligence this car offers the true democracy of mob rule. Every seat has a steering wheel so that each passenger can vote on which direction to go. And in an accident there is no longer any clear person to blame, it's a perfect system like our glorious democracy.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The roads will be a lot cleaner after one of these goes by. The one I'm waiting for is the Roomba car - self driving and learns the way to your destination by bumping into things along the way.
It took Dyson 15 years and 5000+ prototypes to get a vacuum right. Yes, a vacuum.
I can only wonder how many tries it's going to take them to get right something as complex as a car.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
It will be the first car to have fans that have no fan blades.
how ugly it will be? For some wierd reason, the designers of all these "radically new tech" vehicles seem to feel a burning need to make it a special kind of fugly.
When another famous British Inventor, Sir Clive Sinclair, invented an electric vehicle he came up with this.
I'll wait for this one sitting down and I'll probably need to steady myself so I won't fall off my chair once it does get released.
Coal-air.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
It would have sold great on the west coast USA.
Actually, in Oregon a tricycle electronically limited to 15mph counts as a bicycle and can drive anywhere. Washington is probably the same.
I'd rather have that than his computer; actually I had two of them as a kid, both Timex/Sinclair 1000 models. I bought them at a yard sale from a graduating college student. It only had 2k of RAM, and booted to a BASIC editor. When the RAM filled up, it just froze. Oops, you wrote to much code. Start over.
In theory you could store programs on cassette tape, but in practice it required buying a special drive that cost more than the computer.
The "car" would still be useful today. He called it a "vehicle, not a car".
***
In Caithness, the seat of Clan Sinclair, there are no bays, protected inlets, or even sandy beaches to haul a ship up onto. There are rocks, with narrow cracks that are only large enough to create a churn. And yet, one of the two main exports from Caithness was fish. (the other of course was rocks) How did they manage it? They would build giant woodworks at the top these cracks in the rocks, and hang ropes down almost as a net; the incoming ship would sail directly into a small opening in the cliffs, and as long as there were people on duty to man the ropes they would be caught and lifted up the rim and secured.
Do not underestimate the ability of a Sinclair engineer to build some amazing machine that you have absolutely no possible use for anywhere else in the world. Before they were Scottish, they were Normans.
Thanks to the OP, we have now reached a Nash equilibrium in this story.
lucm, indeed.
My wife has a Dyson V8 "Animal" at home. It works really well - as long as you have one of the two power heads on it (it comes with one for carpets, the other for hard floors). On its own the V8 actually sucks at sucking - it can't pick up dust and hair from furniture without a power head fitted.
The motor is built already - can the DC brushless be improved upon? They could be using an Induction motor like Tesla but I donâ(TM)t think there is much R&D neede here - the battery is really the on;y thing that would potentially make this car revolutionary.
It's not the owner of the VW that has the problem, it's the person driving behind them.
How to win friends and influence enemies, hey?
About as catchy as hot air
Regardless of what it ends up being, I already know the marketing narrative.
They started before Ford, they went through a million prototypes, and that's why you need to pay them 10x the price of a regular car.
While I'd certainly agree that technology (or the lack of it) plays an important part in the slowness to accept electric vehicles, but if you market it at a price that is outside of the reach of the mass consumer, you can't exactly hope for large scale appeal either.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I wished Ballard didn't give up on their gas-turbine electric car.
They just kind of... gave up. At the time there was no real excuse, just a statement that said something to the effect of "Umm, nevermind, we're dropping everything and moving all research to fuel cells."
Problem is, fuel cells are just glorified batteries. The gas-turbine directly converted fuel to energy without that huge conversion step in the middle.
Kriston
>The gas-turbine directly converted fuel to energy without that huge conversion step in the middle.
Uhh. You mean the turbine converted fuel to mechanical energy (and heat), converted to electricity (and heat), and converted to mechanical energy (and heat).
As opposed to a fuel cell converting fuel to electricity (and heat), to mechanical energy (and heat)?
I believe the trademarked phrase is "Nothing sucks like a VAX!" for the Australian Hoover (and I don't mean J. Edgar).
These are really more an electric broom than a vacuum. But they do ok for touch up jobs, wouldn't want to use it as the only vacuum cleaner. Quite expensive for that use case though.
They were good from a size/weight perspective, and had decent fuel consumption for a gas turbine. But Atkinson cycle ICEs have significantly better fuel economy, which pushed the use case into low volume applications (eg: Bladen jet's power generation for telecoms equipment) that were ultimately not profitable enough.
Pretty certain we had the Electrolux slogan. Kinda recall VAX, maybe they ditched that when it didnâ(TM)t translate to sales.
Somebody photoshop up an amusing vacuum cleaner based car concept!
But the smart money is on this project utterly failing. There is a huge amount of technical and marketing expertise involved in designing something as complex as a car. If he's coming into this without involving a lot of people really experienced with all aspects of car development, the chances are really good that the project will be doomed to failure.
Common, it's Dyson that we're talking about.
The guy who takes the concept of "over-engineering", laugh at it and then turn the level up to 11.
The guy who cannot comprehend the concept of over-spending. (And that's both during design AND the price the customers are then expected to pay for)
The guy who utterly fails to understand why there is even a "budget" category, or what are the main points attracting customers to current tech.
We all know how this will end. (Just look at his fans and vacuum cleaners for a reference - case in point : their vacuuming robot is wrong on so many levels).
Dyson *will* successfully develop a new electric car.
With brand new motor and brand new battery techs.
Except that this new car will cost 10 millions £, will be extremely loud, and at the end of the day actually fulfils only marginally better the needs of the customer.
And due to its weird "designer" shape cannot even take most of the tunnels around your country.
And if the car is too different from existing designs, he's going to have a hell of a time convincing people to buy it.
That I totally agree.
I half expect the car to be sphere shaped.
(The other half expects the car to be shaped like an empty torus for weird aerodynamics reasons).
Basically people need a more or less cheap box to get around.
Expect Dyson to construct something that is more appropriate for some World Designer Expo.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
There are great room for innovation in the electric vehicle market. Some suggestions.
Electric cars should be quite easy to do amphiobous. Electric cars don't need a big, open grille.
Electric cars should have 230V/110V electric outlets for power tools and camping.
There is only one electric car that can have a tow hitch, and that particular vehicle is extremly expensive and can't have a roof box.
Also, nobody have made an electric car even closely resembling the dyson 360 eye. That would be 1950-futuristic.
A gas turbine has a big flaw: it's only efficient when running at full power, and a huge fuel hog at lower power settings. So you'd need to install a turbine AND a battery pack, and run the turbine intermittently.
In the mean time, batteries got good enough that you can skip the onboard generator entirely and just install a big battery, saving lots of money on complicated mechanical parts.
Being down for so long two days in a row? A so big site? A site for nerds, mostly from the computer sub-division? Isn't it a bit weird? Also why aren't they sharing any details about the problems?
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
"We don't have an existing chassis [...] We're starting from scratch. What we're doing is quite radical."
In other words, we don't actually have a car. They don't even have a spec. They have a "big vision"..
We saw a lot of this during the 1990's. Boys, it's time to go back to selling Aereon chairs, sexy laptops, and expensive craft beers to suckers. And make sure to get cash, or get their bills paid *before* the next delivery.
Turbines also tend to be noisy, and finicky, and have long spool-up times. It was worth giving them a shot, but they never really panned out, either for direct drive or as range extenders.
All we want to do is eat your brains.
Given that Dyson typically sells vacuum cleaners and hairdryers I'm not especially convinced they have the resources to produce any kind of electric vehicle unless it is powered by washing machine motors, a la the Sinclair C5. In which case, good luck with that.
What does "more efficient" have to do with electric vehicles? Energy density is a bigger concern by far in EVs, I think even older EV batteries are in the high 90s as far as discharge efficiency. There are some losses in charging, but I'm not sure what can be done in that arena besides slowing the charge rate but even with that I think they easily top 80% efficiency.
It will drive backwards...
When another famous British Inventor, Sir Clive Sinclair, invented an electric vehicle he came up with this.
I'll wait for this one sitting down and I'll probably need to steady myself so I won't fall off my chair once it does get released.
Sold to the wrong market at the wrong time. Terribly suited to Britain's damp climate- but for a nice electric assist bike-car hybrid for the price of a premium bicycle- it was an idea outside it's time. Considering how bad battery tech was in the 80's it was a decent product. Just marketed to the wrong people, in the wrong place. A C5 developed today with today's technology and environmental sensibilities would probably be a hit in many places.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Sinclair made some great computers if you consider the timeframe. The later Sinclair Spectrum was a huge success, didn't really go far in US market but in other places it was a success. No special drive required, you could just hook up any cassette player. A few years later you could use a disk drive if you had one instead.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
So it's going to be an electric car that truly sucks! LOL!
I've got nothing but great memories of Sinclair ZX Spectrum... compared to what you were using, this was a beast. 48K of memory, works with any cassette player, built-in audio... :)
And, best of all, those rubber keys will BASIC words built-in, so you don't even need a book to figure out what all is available to do. I learned programming by trying every "command" to see what it does. :)
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
These guys have just turned over the hourglass on their project. New tech? Random Chinese company X will magically have a very similar product out sooner or later, and they don't sit around when it comes to these things. They'll profit off that IP posthaste. Were I in Dyson's shoes, I'd be kicking things into overdrive.
> Turbines also tend to be noisy
The turbine engine of M1 Abrams battle tank is suprisingly silent. On the other hand it goes less miles on 500 gallons of fuel compared to the V-12 diesel powered german Leopard-2 tank with 300 gallons, even though both war chariots have identical 1500hp output and very similar gross weight. Starting up the Abrams from cold consumes 40 liters alone, which would drive a modern sub-compact car with 2 people in it as far Daytona 500, start to finish.
Fuel consumption was so abysmal during the 1991 Iraq war that small diesel-electric generators were tied onto the mud-guard of Abrams tanks, so crews didn't need to keep the 1500hp turbine running during stand-still. That kind of setup is only common with long-range 155mm self-propelled artillery but later it was made a permanent fixture on the M1 Abrams, by attaching the generator to the back of the turret.
Unfortunately, to go from point A to point B, the car will follow a zig-zag pattern to cover a lot of area in between, and you'll have to empty your trunk after each trip.
Sorry Dyson, you're not Musk.
As fun as it would have been, you had the unluckyness to be born in Britain. And you'll always be an order of magnitude less famous, influential, powerful or creative because of it. You're like a local towns white-goods-store magnate. Provincially powerful, a big fish in a rapidly draining and putrifying pond. Stick to selling Hoovers. You're not getting invited to the Bilderburbs or playing any role in humanities nascent transhuman development.
Just like Apple: It's form over function all the way. Except, weirdly, all their product "forms" look like they were designed by a retarded 9 year old who thinks the 90s is the epitome of futuristic cool.
Also, they charge too much. It's like they've come to the conclusion that if they just overcharge by a bit everyone will think their products are rip-offs, but if they outrageously overcharge (like, 300% of the cost of something that does the same job) everyone will be like, hey I've got to get me one of those.
My wife got one of their cordless vacuum cleaners to replace a Numatic Henry. It's okay for some jobs, stairs especially stairs, but mostly it just hangs on the wall and the Henry still does the heavy work.
That's what I'm thinking.
But the devil is in the details. It's not about whether you have a design, it's whether you can build it at scale / have facilities that can pump out millions of them. Otherwise, you're just taking money and perhaps supplying a few hundred, at the cost of...billions of pounds.
Sure there's a market for street sweepers!
Just another day in Paradise
Common, it's Dyson that we're talking about.
I think the word (actually phrase) you're looking for is "come on". Unless you're talking to some one named Common.
it's only efficient when running at full power, and a huge fuel hog at lower power settings.
That is nonsense.
As soon as you are in the mid range it is already quite efficient (considering the maximum): http://www.dg.history.vt.edu/c...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
But turbines find funny usages in niche markets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There is another video (which I did not find right now) where you see how that plane is fired up.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I just want someone to explain to me what the hell a digital motor is that they advertise all the time when I still see spinning analog motors in their vacuums.
It's market-speak buzzwords for "IC-driven AC motor".
They are all AC motor
- you got a spinning rotor in the middle, whose magnetic field can be static (e.g.: even a rare earth permanent magnet can do it).
- you got a stator on the outside that uses electro magnets.
You need to feed AC current to the stator, so the magnetic polarity of the electro magnet will change overtime, which will cause the rotor to turn.
In classical AC motors (market speak "analog") :
- you simply feed an AC current into the electro magnet (some industrial appliance in Europe even use the fact that you got tri-phase power plugs - you just put 3 electro magnet at 60 deg of each other and because of the phase shift between each live feed, you get automatically 50Hz spinning with almost no electrical wiring complexity).
If your pet has a small water fountain for drinking, it's likely that it uses this kind of AC motor in its pump (but only using a single 50/60Hz 12v AC feed).
The draw-back is that the most simple implementation only works best at a single motor RPM (3000 or 3600 RPMs in my above examples).
(So it works best for air vacuum pumps. I.e.: where the turbofan is free to spin at its optimal speed. Such simple wiring won't work best for cars where speed and power vary).
In IC-driven AC motors (market speak "digital") :
- you feed a high power DC current to an electronic chip. That chip will usually use PWM (or some similar approach) and will produce an ideally shaped AC current. The shape of this AC current (both the power, the frequency, and the phase going to each electromagnet) can be adapted to the current speed and to the amount of physical obstacles (friction/viscosity/whatever) the motor need to rotate against.
That is the kind of technology that goes into EV motors (like the Tesla) - because they need to be optimal over a very wide range of RPMs / horsepower of traction.
Speaking of water pumps, that's also the kind of things that you got into DDC Laing watercooling pumps in your computer (and thus it could adapt easily and optimaly to any kind of resistance in the tube you connected them to).
A "digital motor" in a Dyson fan blower is complete over engineering.
Yup in theory driving the FAN's AC motor with an IC makes them more powerful / tiny bit more efficient. But who the hell needs that much engineering into an accessory that basically just needs to stir the air around a bit ?
Yes, techno-geek reviewer on youtube will go nut when they analyse the "perfectness" of the AC feed going into the motor with their oscilloscope.
But at the end of the day, it's pretty much useless over-engineering.
A "digital motor" in an EV is a necessity, and there's already a ton of research being done in the field.
Basically, Dyson's PR/Marketing department is simply telling Tesla: "our engineers are going to be better than yours".
Given the kind of budget that Dyson is usually throwing on R&D and hiring the best engineers : yes, they might produce better motors.
But the motors will be only marginally better (because the rest of the EV field is also spending a lot on R&D already, there isn't much left for Dyson to improve) and will cost a metric-fuckton more than the nearest competitor.
Also, expect the car to be shaped like an empty doughnut for some weird bullshit aerodynamic reasons.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Perhaps if he blows away the Tesla P100D (or whatever's current in their lineup at that time) on straightline acceleration, he'll get an obligatory number of sales from that chunk of the superrich that have to have all of the fastest toys.
And given how Dyson markets its over expensive and well-fucking-over-engineered fans, vacuum cleaners, hairdryers and vacuuming robots, that clealy seems to be the only market strategy on which Dyson focuses.
And given their pricing tendency, you can expect the cars to cost in the million price range. And thus selling the small number of cars you mentioned will be enough to cover their cost.
The rest of the planet can safely ignore their circus.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The link you gave has no information on efficiency vs. rpm, just peak efficiency.
Yes, it has. :D
There is a nice graph in the middle of the text
But you likely can find better links your own.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Will it be feet-powered like the Flintstones?
That graph shows efficiency vs. nominal power output. It compares large vs. small turbines. It says nothing about running turbines at off-nominal rpm!
A GIANT HAMSTER BALL :O
The biggest problem with the C5 "Electric car" was the same as you have with recumbent bicycles - the guy in the big truck literally cannot see you down there. So you end up attaching a whip antenna and a flag just to avoid getting crushed by a truck.