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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."
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.