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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."
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.
I'm going to go against the grain by saying I was extremely impressed with their engineering prowess.
I watched a YouTube video where a mechanical engineer disassembled one of their motors and used an oscilloscope to show how they got so much power out of a tiny little moter.
I'm not joking it was actually very impressive, the way the power ramped up using a digital function was amazing. It wasn't like they just used a bigger motor and applied simple power to it. The motor was receiving so much power that it would actually be destroyed if the power wasn't ocellated in that exact way.
So if anything I think they're major innovation is going to be the motor in the vehicle. I'm not so interested in the rest of their packaging but I will always acknowledge and impressive engineering talent whenever I see it.
Don't mix up "bucking traditional style trends in order to be deliberately unusual" (for example, Prius Prime) with "bucking traditional style trends because it matters for aerodynamics" (such as aero wheels, grilleless designs, greater rear taper, shallower windshield rake, etc). The former is for people who want to shout to other drivers, "HEY, I'M DRIVING A GREEN CAR!!!", while the latter is simply physics and economics - lower energy consumption means smaller battery packs / less weight / less cost (or instead, longer range), fewer cycles at lower DoD on the packs, less cost to charge, faster charging from a given power source, etc, etc. It basically gives you a better, cheaper car.
Style trends change. Sometimes manufacturers buck style trends to stand out - with the Prius Prime, for example, there's nothing about having your rear end look like it was stepped on by a giant that helps your efficiency. But more often, they do so because it offers serious potential benefits. The latter slowly tends to become mainstream over time. "Back in the day", cars that didn't look like carriages were seen as weird. Raked, windshields (let alone curved ones)? Headlights -embedded- in the hood? A curved hood? Any taper whatsoever? Bumpers? On and on the list goes - all used to be seen as "fugly". As weirdmobiles. But they won out because they offered very real advantages, and people's style expectations changed accordingly as that's what they got used to seeing.
All we want to do is eat your brains.
You don't want to do wheel motors. You want as little unsprung mass on the wheels as you can get away with, unless you are only driving on a perfectly flat -- no potholes, no rumble strips, no expansion joints, no cracks, no ruts, no washboard -- road surface.