8 ms·

The collapse of Dyson's electric car dream

46 points by prostoalex 7y ago

binarymax 7y ago
I really enjoy AvE's teardowns of the Dyson tech [0]. NSFW because the guy swears like it's going out of style, but highly entertaining, blunt, and informative. It gives a nice glimpse into the tradoffs of engineering, cost, and serviceability in the face of an enormously well marketed product. [0] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ave+dyson https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ave+dyson
- lozaning 7y ago
  His Juicero teardown is also gold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
  - binarymax 7y ago
    Indeed, shame we'll never get to see him teardown the Dyson EV!
- anon1m0us 7y ago
  I absolutely love the knowledge he shares with the world. I wonder why he delivers the way he does. He's a character. Sometimes I wish I could get the knowledge without the character.
  - ficklepickle 7y ago
    His character is fairly common amongst the blue collar, oil worker type in northern BC/Alberta. I've met a number of people with similar character, down to the accent and jargon. While no group is perfect, I do appreciate the characteristic straightforwardness. You usually know exactly where you stand with somebody like this.
    - anon1m0us 7y ago
      You've got me thinking. I noticed something similar about another blue collar youtuber from BC. A tree feller, named Buckin' Billy Ray. They're both happy-go-lucky with a sprinkle of resignation. I didn't know what AvE did for work and was curious what kind of career would require someone to know so much. I imagine now, from what you said, he must be the guy who keeps all the tools working. They are both incredibly confident and self-assured. AvE can fix anything and Buckin' Billy Ray can cut down anything. I see what you mean too. I trust both of them. I know they will do a good job and that's critical in their line of work, because if they don't, someone might die.
codeulike 7y ago
This Dyson car idea always did sound weird. I like his reasons for trying. But its very hard to make a decent AND affordable electric car. I have no doubt Dyson could have made a decent one, but to make it affordable they would have needed huge economies of scale, or huge risk-taking balls a la Tesla. And as the article said, there was no point betting their stable existing business on a new moon shot. Maybe 15 or 20 years ago, before Tesla had kicked the electric car segment up the arse, and the options around were all still pretty crappy, then an expensive Dyson electric car might have made sense. But in todays market it would have to compete with the Tesla Model 3, the Hyundai Kona EV and the Kia Niro EV and there's no way Dyson would have been able to make anything with similar specs at a similar price.
- purple_ducks 7y ago
  > I have no doubt Dyson could have made a decent one, I have nothing but doubt Dyson could have made one, let alone a decent one.
  - hiven 7y ago
    Agree. He makes plastic overpriced vacuums, he needs to know his limits. As a Hullavington local I have nothing but disdain for this man.
  - beerandt 7y ago
    They already know electric motors and batteries. That gives them at least an edge. And marketing bs aside, the motors themselves are an impressive technical feat. Although they're high rpm & low torque, so maybe not applicable.
    - acoye 7y ago
      > They already know electric motors and batteries. That gives them at least an edge. I'd like to argue batteries and mass production are the issue and genuinely hard to solve. Not async motors and inverter circuits. To my knowledge they use 3rd party batteries for applications where it is not a limiting factor that need to be pushed over but I could be wrong.
juanbyrge 7y ago
Instead of intertwining the electric car project with the other Dyson core businesses, couldn't he have spun up a separate entity and raised funding? Seems like it would be a very attractive investment considering his track record.
- codeulike 7y ago
  Or license the tech they had developed to other manufacturers. Maybe that will still happen.
- simonh 7y ago
  The problem is the scale, as the article pointed out VW is putting $50bn into it, and still needs to partner with another manufacturer because that’s not enough. He went after the wrong end of the market. Tesla did it right. Start with a premium, high margin low volume sports car. Everything about that strategy plays to the advantage of a new entrant. Starting at the low price end means you have to go to massive scale from day one. Getting everything about that right, the first time, at huge scale is just not viable for a new entrant.
  - benj111 7y ago
    "no price except an acknowledgement it would be more expensive than most" So they were starting at the premium end.
    - simonh 7y ago
      I think that's more an acknowledgement of their inability to control costs.
      - benj111 7y ago
        You could say that about any expensive thing. The question is whether people would have been willing to pay more for a Dyson car. The fact that they got people to pay more for vacuums, fans, heaters and hair dryers suggests they would.
bigYahnz 7y ago
Did anyone expect a different outcome?
projektfu 7y ago
I don't believe a word of this story.
- metalliqaz 7y ago
  care to explain why?
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    The outrageous distance required to make the leap from consumer vacuum cleaners to cars. It's not unlike Parrot or DJI saying they're going to start making private jets. A certain skepticism was inevitable. Brightly coloured plastic is not a sufficient USP for a car. And don't forget Apple failed in this space, with much bigger resources. It's not even the product design, which was non-trivial, but not impossibly unlikely. It's the logistics and operations - raw materials, parts sourcing and supply chain design, manufacturing and assembly, delivery, servicing, maintenance, spares, certification, dealer relationships, charging... And the testing required to get 200k miles out of the product. My guess is the timescale didn't work. The car was probably at least a couple of years from production, and would have been overtaken by smarter and more interesting products from the established players.
  - projektfu 7y ago
    I was going to say more, but it was unnecessary. Why should we believe that Dyson was 95% of the way there and abandoned it because they didn't want to risk the rest of the business?
nprateem 7y ago
If only he could have waited until the 31st he'd have been able to sell his electric cars reaping all the benefits of the Brexit he's so in favour of (prior to leaving the country he shafted). Couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy.
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  Why are all these rich people for Brexit I wonder? Do they think they'll pay less taxes or something? That's sad that he is for it.
  - bsder 7y ago
    > Why are all these rich people for Brexit I wonder? They have cash. They assume that with Brexit, a whole lot of punters will go broke and they can vacuum up the assets for pennies on the dollar.
m-i-l 7y ago
Has anybody seen any articles which actually have pictures of the car or car parts? According to this article they "had finally produced a driveable prototype", and e.g. the BBC article[0] says "The first cars had already been developed and were being tested". Seems like nearly £200m had already been spent ("The company also planned to invest £200m ... Much of that money has already been spent"[0]) so you would hope there was something to show for it. [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50004184 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50004184
InTheArena 7y ago
Someone was telling me yesterday - well after the news came out - that Tesla was going to collapse before WeWork did, because after all - Tesla can't compete with all of the new players coming into the space, in particular Dyson. They looked a bit crestfallen when I broke it to them that there would be no car. I've regretted every Dyson I have purchased. I have two very expensive plastic vacuum cleaners in my garage. It's hard building cars... it's hard surviving building cars ... it's hard surviving building cars while scaling.
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  There's just something about Tesla's continually promising incredible things, and delivering most of it a little late that really irritates people. Yet no one else is doing anything remotely like it. My 2012 tesla model s85 has better range than a 180k first gen porsche taycan. It's beyond tedious now how people keep thinking they are doomed because of some reason...
  - InTheArena 7y ago
    People with a lot to loose if SpaceX and Tesla are long-term successful are opening up with both barrels. Elon tacks close to the wind with what he does - probably to avoid situations like the above. Hence the hope/despair cycles.
  - antonvs 7y ago
    The only people it irritates are the overenthusiastic fanboys and slightly too gullible investors. Everyone else can just sit back and watch innovation happen at a pretty decent pace.
- geerlingguy 7y ago
  Some of their vacuums are competitive if you have certain needs that they meet. But most of their other products are obscenely expensive for what they do.
- acoye 7y ago
  > It's hard building cars... it's hard surviving building cars ... it's hard surviving building cars while scaling. I think you nailed it right there.
jsight 7y ago
Yeah, this has been so predictable. There are a lot of people who seem to feel like Tesla's accomplishments are trivial, but the reality is that building cars is hard. Building them at any kind of scale (even tens of thousands a year) is incredibly hard for a business that has never done it before. The great surprise isn't so much the failures as that Tesla has succeeded at getting to the volumes that they have.
- cogman10 7y ago
  And more. Tesla didn't just make "The" electric car, they made a charging network better than pretty much anything else out there. At this point other contenders are simply to late to the game. Tesla fundamentally changed the market and they have established themselves in a way that will be hard for competitors to topple. After all, when Tesla pushed out the X/S, what was the competition doing? Mostly just retrofitting batteries and engines as cheap as possible on current frames. Tesla made a car that could be a universal car while everyone else was focused on short range secondary commuters. Now, competition not only has to compete with the fact that Tesla is what people think of when they think "Next green car" they also have to find some way they can be better with a public charging network that is 10 years behind what Tesla currently has. It isn't enough to push out a car that can go 200 miles on batteries alone anymore. You have to be better than Tesla, and that is a really high bar. So, the real question is "What's next for tesla" can they continue to be the best in class? Will they be upstaged by the current old guard? Who knows? One thing is for sure, car companies are going to need to evolve to compete with Tesla's offerings.
  - sh87 7y ago
    I hope Competition (as a verb) will do what it does best - make the product offering better and cheaper. Next step for electric cars would be to address issues for non-home-owners (like me) and consequently can't find a convenient way to charge up an electric car. Hot swappable batteries come to mind.
    - cogman10 7y ago
      I don't think that will ever really be a thing. The problem with hot swap batteries is that you are trading a battery of unknown quality for something else. Imagine swapping in a 10 yo battery for brand new battery. That would kind of suck. The thing that will probably make things more tenable for non-home owners will be bigger battery densities. If you get 500 miles of range on a charge, then stopping by a fast charger once or twice a week wouldn't really be all that big of an issue. You don't even have to go to 100%, just enough to cover a week's worth of commuting. The other thing that would make this better is a bigger source of public L2 or even L1 chargers.
davidwitt415 7y ago
Wired's cheerleading style is beyond tedious at this point. They take it as a given that Dyson had designed a 'revolutionary electric vehicle,' a safe ploy as nobody has seen it. Yet, it would indeed take a LOT to be a 'revolutionary' vehicle at this point, and more likely the result was just a 'me too' electric car with some stylized Dyson plastic bits around it.
- IshKebab 7y ago
  Yeah I think probably the issue was that it wasn't revolutionary. Dyson really likes unique inventions that he can patent because it allows a healthy profit margin. I think the unique thing for the car was probably supposed to be the batteries, but last I heard they're made by chemical vapour deposition, which doesn't exactly scale to car batteries.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
krm01 7y ago
Elon’s ‘Masterplan’ was probably the better way for Dyson as well. Don’t start off mass producing the vehicle for everybody. Make a few for the very rich. Reinvest to make a slightly cheaper car for more people. Take that money and repeat. Would love to see more diverse players enter the arena. Competition in this particular field would be great to see unfold.
elihu 7y ago
Honestly, I think if someone has an innovative idea regarding some part of an electric vehicle, in most cases they should just manufacture that component and push for standardization so that the component can be easily integrated into other designs. Building a whole car is something that few companies have the experience and engineering budget to pull off. I'm hoping that over time electric car parts become more standardized. There's only so many ways to make an electric motor, and there's no particular reason why every motor should have a different bolt pattern on its faceplate or a shaft with a different number of splines.
sunstone 7y ago
Kind of interesting that Dyson intends to continue with electric motors and batteries just not with the cars. I wonder if they have a plan b vehicle up their sleeve. Going electric allows for a lot of things that a heavy ICE would preclude.

46 points by prostoalex 7y ago

I really enjoy AvE's teardowns of the Dyson tech [0]. NSFW because the guy swears like it's going out of style, but highly entertaining, blunt, and informative. It gives a nice glimpse into the tradoffs of engineering, cost, and serviceability in the face of an enormously well marketed product. [0] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ave+dyson https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ave+dyson

lozaning 7y ago
His Juicero teardown is also gold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
- binarymax 7y ago
  Indeed, shame we'll never get to see him teardown the Dyson EV!
anon1m0us 7y ago
I absolutely love the knowledge he shares with the world. I wonder why he delivers the way he does. He's a character. Sometimes I wish I could get the knowledge without the character.
- ficklepickle 7y ago
  His character is fairly common amongst the blue collar, oil worker type in northern BC/Alberta. I've met a number of people with similar character, down to the accent and jargon. While no group is perfect, I do appreciate the characteristic straightforwardness. You usually know exactly where you stand with somebody like this.
  - anon1m0us 7y ago
    You've got me thinking. I noticed something similar about another blue collar youtuber from BC. A tree feller, named Buckin' Billy Ray. They're both happy-go-lucky with a sprinkle of resignation. I didn't know what AvE did for work and was curious what kind of career would require someone to know so much. I imagine now, from what you said, he must be the guy who keeps all the tools working. They are both incredibly confident and self-assured. AvE can fix anything and Buckin' Billy Ray can cut down anything. I see what you mean too. I trust both of them. I know they will do a good job and that's critical in their line of work, because if they don't, someone might die.

codeulike 7y ago

This Dyson car idea always did sound weird. I like his reasons for trying. But its very hard to make a decent AND affordable electric car. I have no doubt Dyson could have made a decent one, but to make it affordable they would have needed huge economies of scale, or huge risk-taking balls a la Tesla. And as the article said, there was no point betting their stable existing business on a new moon shot. Maybe 15 or 20 years ago, before Tesla had kicked the electric car segment up the arse, and the options around were all still pretty crappy, then an expensive Dyson electric car might have made sense. But in todays market it would have to compete with the Tesla Model 3, the Hyundai Kona EV and the Kia Niro EV and there's no way Dyson would have been able to make anything with similar specs at a similar price.

purple_ducks 7y ago
> I have no doubt Dyson could have made a decent one, I have nothing but doubt Dyson could have made one, let alone a decent one.
- hiven 7y ago
  Agree. He makes plastic overpriced vacuums, he needs to know his limits. As a Hullavington local I have nothing but disdain for this man.
- beerandt 7y ago
  They already know electric motors and batteries. That gives them at least an edge. And marketing bs aside, the motors themselves are an impressive technical feat. Although they're high rpm & low torque, so maybe not applicable.
  - acoye 7y ago
    > They already know electric motors and batteries. That gives them at least an edge. I'd like to argue batteries and mass production are the issue and genuinely hard to solve. Not async motors and inverter circuits. To my knowledge they use 3rd party batteries for applications where it is not a limiting factor that need to be pushed over but I could be wrong.

juanbyrge 7y ago

Instead of intertwining the electric car project with the other Dyson core businesses, couldn't he have spun up a separate entity and raised funding? Seems like it would be a very attractive investment considering his track record.

codeulike 7y ago
Or license the tech they had developed to other manufacturers. Maybe that will still happen.
simonh 7y ago
The problem is the scale, as the article pointed out VW is putting $50bn into it, and still needs to partner with another manufacturer because that’s not enough. He went after the wrong end of the market. Tesla did it right. Start with a premium, high margin low volume sports car. Everything about that strategy plays to the advantage of a new entrant. Starting at the low price end means you have to go to massive scale from day one. Getting everything about that right, the first time, at huge scale is just not viable for a new entrant.
- benj111 7y ago
  "no price except an acknowledgement it would be more expensive than most" So they were starting at the premium end.
  - simonh 7y ago
    I think that's more an acknowledgement of their inability to control costs.
    - benj111 7y ago
      You could say that about any expensive thing. The question is whether people would have been willing to pay more for a Dyson car. The fact that they got people to pay more for vacuums, fans, heaters and hair dryers suggests they would.

bigYahnz 7y ago

Did anyone expect a different outcome?

projektfu 7y ago

I don't believe a word of this story.

metalliqaz 7y ago
care to explain why?
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  The outrageous distance required to make the leap from consumer vacuum cleaners to cars. It's not unlike Parrot or DJI saying they're going to start making private jets. A certain skepticism was inevitable. Brightly coloured plastic is not a sufficient USP for a car. And don't forget Apple failed in this space, with much bigger resources. It's not even the product design, which was non-trivial, but not impossibly unlikely. It's the logistics and operations - raw materials, parts sourcing and supply chain design, manufacturing and assembly, delivery, servicing, maintenance, spares, certification, dealer relationships, charging... And the testing required to get 200k miles out of the product. My guess is the timescale didn't work. The car was probably at least a couple of years from production, and would have been overtaken by smarter and more interesting products from the established players.
- projektfu 7y ago
  I was going to say more, but it was unnecessary. Why should we believe that Dyson was 95% of the way there and abandoned it because they didn't want to risk the rest of the business?

nprateem 7y ago

If only he could have waited until the 31st he'd have been able to sell his electric cars reaping all the benefits of the Brexit he's so in favour of (prior to leaving the country he shafted). Couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy.

NotSammyHagar 7y ago
Why are all these rich people for Brexit I wonder? Do they think they'll pay less taxes or something? That's sad that he is for it.
- bsder 7y ago
  > Why are all these rich people for Brexit I wonder? They have cash. They assume that with Brexit, a whole lot of punters will go broke and they can vacuum up the assets for pennies on the dollar.

m-i-l 7y ago

Has anybody seen any articles which actually have pictures of the car or car parts? According to this article they "had finally produced a driveable prototype", and e.g. the BBC article[0] says "The first cars had already been developed and were being tested". Seems like nearly £200m had already been spent ("The company also planned to invest £200m ... Much of that money has already been spent"[0]) so you would hope there was something to show for it. [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50004184 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50004184

InTheArena 7y ago

Someone was telling me yesterday - well after the news came out - that Tesla was going to collapse before WeWork did, because after all - Tesla can't compete with all of the new players coming into the space, in particular Dyson. They looked a bit crestfallen when I broke it to them that there would be no car. I've regretted every Dyson I have purchased. I have two very expensive plastic vacuum cleaners in my garage. It's hard building cars... it's hard surviving building cars ... it's hard surviving building cars while scaling.

NotSammyHagar 7y ago
There's just something about Tesla's continually promising incredible things, and delivering most of it a little late that really irritates people. Yet no one else is doing anything remotely like it. My 2012 tesla model s85 has better range than a 180k first gen porsche taycan. It's beyond tedious now how people keep thinking they are doomed because of some reason...
- InTheArena 7y ago
  People with a lot to loose if SpaceX and Tesla are long-term successful are opening up with both barrels. Elon tacks close to the wind with what he does - probably to avoid situations like the above. Hence the hope/despair cycles.
- antonvs 7y ago
  The only people it irritates are the overenthusiastic fanboys and slightly too gullible investors. Everyone else can just sit back and watch innovation happen at a pretty decent pace.
geerlingguy 7y ago
Some of their vacuums are competitive if you have certain needs that they meet. But most of their other products are obscenely expensive for what they do.
acoye 7y ago
> It's hard building cars... it's hard surviving building cars ... it's hard surviving building cars while scaling. I think you nailed it right there.

jsight 7y ago

Yeah, this has been so predictable. There are a lot of people who seem to feel like Tesla's accomplishments are trivial, but the reality is that building cars is hard. Building them at any kind of scale (even tens of thousands a year) is incredibly hard for a business that has never done it before. The great surprise isn't so much the failures as that Tesla has succeeded at getting to the volumes that they have.

cogman10 7y ago
And more. Tesla didn't just make "The" electric car, they made a charging network better than pretty much anything else out there. At this point other contenders are simply to late to the game. Tesla fundamentally changed the market and they have established themselves in a way that will be hard for competitors to topple. After all, when Tesla pushed out the X/S, what was the competition doing? Mostly just retrofitting batteries and engines as cheap as possible on current frames. Tesla made a car that could be a universal car while everyone else was focused on short range secondary commuters. Now, competition not only has to compete with the fact that Tesla is what people think of when they think "Next green car" they also have to find some way they can be better with a public charging network that is 10 years behind what Tesla currently has. It isn't enough to push out a car that can go 200 miles on batteries alone anymore. You have to be better than Tesla, and that is a really high bar. So, the real question is "What's next for tesla" can they continue to be the best in class? Will they be upstaged by the current old guard? Who knows? One thing is for sure, car companies are going to need to evolve to compete with Tesla's offerings.
- sh87 7y ago
  I hope Competition (as a verb) will do what it does best - make the product offering better and cheaper. Next step for electric cars would be to address issues for non-home-owners (like me) and consequently can't find a convenient way to charge up an electric car. Hot swappable batteries come to mind.
  - cogman10 7y ago
    I don't think that will ever really be a thing. The problem with hot swap batteries is that you are trading a battery of unknown quality for something else. Imagine swapping in a 10 yo battery for brand new battery. That would kind of suck. The thing that will probably make things more tenable for non-home owners will be bigger battery densities. If you get 500 miles of range on a charge, then stopping by a fast charger once or twice a week wouldn't really be all that big of an issue. You don't even have to go to 100%, just enough to cover a week's worth of commuting. The other thing that would make this better is a bigger source of public L2 or even L1 chargers.

davidwitt415 7y ago

Wired's cheerleading style is beyond tedious at this point. They take it as a given that Dyson had designed a 'revolutionary electric vehicle,' a safe ploy as nobody has seen it. Yet, it would indeed take a LOT to be a 'revolutionary' vehicle at this point, and more likely the result was just a 'me too' electric car with some stylized Dyson plastic bits around it.

IshKebab 7y ago
Yeah I think probably the issue was that it wasn't revolutionary. Dyson really likes unique inventions that he can patent because it allows a healthy profit margin. I think the unique thing for the car was probably supposed to be the batteries, but last I heard they're made by chemical vapour deposition, which doesn't exactly scale to car batteries.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

krm01 7y ago

Elon’s ‘Masterplan’ was probably the better way for Dyson as well. Don’t start off mass producing the vehicle for everybody. Make a few for the very rich. Reinvest to make a slightly cheaper car for more people. Take that money and repeat. Would love to see more diverse players enter the arena. Competition in this particular field would be great to see unfold.

elihu 7y ago

Honestly, I think if someone has an innovative idea regarding some part of an electric vehicle, in most cases they should just manufacture that component and push for standardization so that the component can be easily integrated into other designs. Building a whole car is something that few companies have the experience and engineering budget to pull off. I'm hoping that over time electric car parts become more standardized. There's only so many ways to make an electric motor, and there's no particular reason why every motor should have a different bolt pattern on its faceplate or a shaft with a different number of splines.

sunstone 7y ago

Kind of interesting that Dyson intends to continue with electric motors and batteries just not with the cars. I wonder if they have a plan b vehicle up their sleeve. Going electric allows for a lot of things that a heavy ICE would preclude.