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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.
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.
...You know that company's track record. Even when their prior products worked as designed and advertised, they sucked....
imo, Dyson shows the ultimate power of marketing. It doesn't necessarily have to work better, you just have to convince consumers willing to pay a lot more to think it works better. Marketing at work.
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 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.
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 ]
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.