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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?
Half of that was just in battery tech. New battery tech can easily repay 2.5bn even if the car never gets manufactured.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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.
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.
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.