Discussion
Couldn’t find a thread on this outside of NPE which had degenerated into the usual conversation about how great the Nazis were.
He’s certainly hired names from the right kind of price points in the industry and I hadn't realised just how big the thing is proposed to be.
I think what’s most interesting is the fact that he is risking pushing the design side away from that of a traditional car. When the EV market place has done this previously they’ve ended up with so much design ridicule that no one has really risked it for a while.
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/dyson-...
He’s certainly hired names from the right kind of price points in the industry and I hadn't realised just how big the thing is proposed to be.
I think what’s most interesting is the fact that he is risking pushing the design side away from that of a traditional car. When the EV market place has done this previously they’ve ended up with so much design ridicule that no one has really risked it for a while.
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/dyson-...
I’ve assumed that the CF would just take a lot more investment to tool up and design whereas ali is much more straightforward?
I don’t think the exterior is where he is adding Dyson design.
What will be interesting is how the brand name transitions. It’s going to be a bit odd telling people at dinner functions that you drive your Dyson. Your fellow guests will be conjuring a bizarre mental picture of your journey.
I don’t think the exterior is where he is adding Dyson design.
What will be interesting is how the brand name transitions. It’s going to be a bit odd telling people at dinner functions that you drive your Dyson. Your fellow guests will be conjuring a bizarre mental picture of your journey.
Pica-Pica said:
Ah, the true Brit Brexit-man, who quit the country!
Tabloid kaffufle. Anyone pro Brexit knows we need to position ourselves more in Asia and be less reliant on the EU going forward. He’s done exactly the right thing. Brains and money in UK, manufacturing where land and labour is cheap. He hasn’t left the UK but positioned his company to best serve his belief that Brexit is the right move.
Brexit isn’t about getting rid of foreigners and building tat back in the UK. It’s actually about business now needing to look beyond the EU and position itself correctly as a result.
sambucket said:
Uh huh. Or....Dyson already had long established supply chain in Asia. The move was more about switching tax base. I think the head count that moved due to switch was something like 2?
I like the low driving position. Tickles my estate glands.
Not convinced dyson have anything special to add from tech angle. Are their electric motors any good? My dyson vac seems pretty shoddy.
Yup. Under a hard Brexit we will see more British firms following Dyson to maximise returns and fully exploit new situations.I like the low driving position. Tickles my estate glands.
Not convinced dyson have anything special to add from tech angle. Are their electric motors any good? My dyson vac seems pretty shoddy.
Re the estate angle, I think Range Rover are still planning their first full EV to be the same.
As for unique and innovative design, they should place ducting around the vehicle and a vacuum motor so you can easily connect a little pipe with vacuum extensions to clean the car out.
untruth said:
I'm on board with whoever said this is another top end of the market play. The market needs affordable, mass produced EVs, not luxury priced EVs. Dyson consistently have demonstrated that their model is sell innovation-led but ultimately simple products at a premium - can't see why this will be any different.
The problem with cheap EVs is that they can’t yet be made cheap enough, there isnt enough battery production yet and it’s the segment that most needs a very comprehensive charging network. The closest so far is VW and even that’s in limited numbers. The whole EV movement is very much too down and it will take some time for that to change.
And when it does I suspect we shall see some unexpected corporate actions as the weaker low end Western car brands get bought out, maybe by tech or retail companies.
Evanivitch said:
It won't. The EV market is dominated by cost and availability at the time. No one needs the cost or weight of a 500 mile car.
The big change in EVs down the line will be dealing with the huge inefficiency of carrying around a massive battery pack. We are obsessed with Range for very logical reasons at present but down the line there is a market for premium EVs with much smaller battery packs. There is a viable number of affluent suburban dwellers who could easily make a 100 mile range car work. True environmentalism would be to tax weight and stimulate a slow move to smaller or lighter cars even if they are powered by ICE.
Evanivitch said:
Agree that tax on mass is a good idea. But should not be to prolong life of ICE.
It would be interesting whether it did. The reality is that all these massive, premium EVs aren’t exactly eco friendly in reality. I suspect that smaller lightweight cars with light drive trains and little petrol engines could clear 100mpg easily and be more environmentally friendly than either current ICE or EV. Edited by Evanivitch on Thursday 16th May 16:03
If we don’t get to vastly cheaper batteries and very big charging infrastructures quickly enough then such a car will be an extremely obvious choice for covering the massive and most polluting bottom end of the market. The uncomfortable truth being that we could have made this change decades ago and yet here we are today with the chosen tax steer of EVs still all a bit of a non entity and toys for the affluent. It could be decades before they are cheap enough for the true masses and making a genuine impact to air quality.
sambucket said:
Phil. said:
Honestly Sam, I think you are trying to goad me. I have explained I am offering a personal opinion that you are welcome to ignore. Feel free to do the same and back up your statements with evidence of your ‘experience’.
Phil. You are a f
kwit. k all money in Africa and that the Chinese are there to strip it of its natural resources. It will indeed be a very long time before you see EVs taking off there even though they have enough sunlight and land to charge for free they simply don’t have the wealth. And that’s before we get to the fact that EVs have only sold in countries where the government have backed them and given incentives. Africa is a political basket case and the only flow of money from governments is out to private Swiss bank accounts.
I’ve libed out there and worked in various parts of Africa. It’s a joke continent of exploitation, theft, corruption and waste.
Heres Johnny said:
It all feels a bit like CD taking over from Vinyl and an argument over mini disk v digital tape and along comes streaming and wipes them all away in what, 15 years?
Meanwhile there's a hard core support for the vinyl just like there will be for ICE
We'll look back on these days and laugh at the idea of carrying over 1000kg of batteries around with us.
I just wish I knew what the streaming equivalent was for cars as thats where to put your money.
I think that’s very true. The Lithium Ion battery is a stop gap. It’s hugely expensive, not environmental, extremely heavy, very big and design restrictive and potentially rather dangerous. In the cold, hard light of day it’s only true redeeming feature is that it’s not as sMeanwhile there's a hard core support for the vinyl just like there will be for ICE
We'll look back on these days and laugh at the idea of carrying over 1000kg of batteries around with us.
I just wish I knew what the streaming equivalent was for cars as thats where to put your money.
t as other batteries. I suspect that the electric motor is likely to continue replacing ICE but one has to imagine that in all likelihood something will appear in the next 20 years that makes the world rush away overnight from using Li batteries in cars.
If it doesn’t then what we will almost certainly see is ICE returning in some form to cater for the high volume, lowest end of the market.
Witchfinder said:
DonkeyApple said:
As opposed to bananas? 
As opposed to hydrogen, which is effectively a battery, just a really crap one.The car world is never going to be powered predominantly by Li batteries and it will be interesting to see what comes along to make them totally redundant as a store of electricity and how long that takes.
EddieSteadyGo said:
True. But a portion of the currently high upfront cost is linked to the very low production volumes. I'm more referring to a stable state situation when a company might be making a million of them a year.
In that situation, the production cost would be lower than vehicles with very large batteries.
But I still agree with the general consensus that battery tech will be the solution for the majority of us here in Europe. But I can see why some very large companies might still spend a (small) portion of the R+D budget on hydrogen-related tech.
Yup. If you can deliver to market an EV that doesn’t have an enormous and extremely expensive battery pack then you’d be able to dramatically undercut the market by shifting that expense on and away from the initial purchase price. That is incentive enough to seek different means of powering electric motors. In that situation, the production cost would be lower than vehicles with very large batteries.
But I still agree with the general consensus that battery tech will be the solution for the majority of us here in Europe. But I can see why some very large companies might still spend a (small) portion of the R+D budget on hydrogen-related tech.
caziques said:
At the risk of going off topic slightly...
The end of life of a car in NZ is invariably mechanical failures, compared with the UK rust is a non issue.
Second hand Leafs (ex Japan) are flooding into NZ - fit a new battery to an EV and it is to all intents and purposes a new car.
Hence there is no reason why the life of an EV in NZ won't be in the tens of years.
Someone here could buy a new 64kW Kona, and never need to buy another car for the rest of their life.
This sounds like a good thing. But it does have a slight flaw. We’ve actually been able to eek huge longevity from cars for decades, even quite badly built ones or ones that live in quite hostile environments. The key is that the owner has to give a crap and actually put some effort in to maintaining the vehicle. The end of life of a car in NZ is invariably mechanical failures, compared with the UK rust is a non issue.
Second hand Leafs (ex Japan) are flooding into NZ - fit a new battery to an EV and it is to all intents and purposes a new car.
Hence there is no reason why the life of an EV in NZ won't be in the tens of years.
Someone here could buy a new 64kW Kona, and never need to buy another car for the rest of their life.
The problem is that this is 100% at odds with modern mass consumption which is all based on not giving a damn, leasing for 3 years and chucking it on as quickly as possible to gorge ourselves on the next fat chunk of excessive consumption.
It’s actually remarkably illogical to assume that because a product has a battery pack instead of a petrol tank that this will somehow manifestly redefine how the entire planet consumes its goods. There’s no logical connection or correlation.
Consumers will still be destroying/consuming EVs as quickly as they are other vehicles. In fact we should probably worry that as the EV is accelerating the importance of in-car tech that the pace of disposal due to on trend redundancy could even increase this rate even though it could be used to retard it.
What we should always keep clear in our minds is that if any of this was truly about the environment and society then we would not be focussing per se in particular fuel types at all but focussing on reducing the use of all fuel types and the individual impact of each product.
Two very simple taxes could define a genuine environmental change and those taxes would be firstly a tax on weight. The enormous weight of vehicles is hugely damaging. It results in the use of more materials, more fuels to transport those materials for a lifetime, more damage to the roads, more damage to each other. A tax that incentivised massive weight reduction would be incredibly environmental in its massive reduction of resource consumption and the applied consumption of the lifetime of the vehicle.
The second simple tax is one of reward for ownership. Reducing the annual tax on a vehicle each year that an individual owns it so as to reward and incentivise reduced consumption. The ramifications of massively reduced vehicle manufacturing and what is produced no longer designed to live through just two 3 year financing contracts but have to be able to live through 10-20 year mortgage like funding deals is immense.
But just thinking laterally about true taxes and incentives to be environmental does make you realise that absolutely nothing that we are doing at all in the realm of personal transport is environmental. It is all about ensuring consumption increases year on year, that taxes grow that wealth flows from the weak nations to the strong.
Modern environmentalism is nothing more than a rebranding and turbocharging of capitalism and excess consumption. Every company in the West is investing in ‘environmental’ marketing to increase the sale of goods, to fuel increasing consumption.
I spent 5 days watching the people of the Extinction Rebellion in London walking in and out of coffee shops, food shops, wandering around drinking bottled water and creating huge amounts of packaging litter and wearing clothes made in the furthest reaches of the third world while screaming their rage at a generation that never bought takeaway coffee, never bought sandwiches in plastic packaging, never bought bottled water etc etc. The failure to comprehend that our excess consumption is not a generational thing but an issue that impacts everyone and is caused by everyone is just another deep issue that clouds true environmentalism.
Something that would truly set Dyson apart would be if they built an EV that was marketed as a ‘car for life’. To be the first firm that didn’t look to sell its customer a new product every 3 years but specifically sold a product intended to last 30 years. A product where you could even exchange bodies on the skate board chassis to ensure that the vehicle fitted with any of your life requirements. Sporty coupe being switched for an estate when the kids come along etc.
But no EV is actually ‘environmental’. It is just another product designed to be consumed and disposed of as quickly as possible so another can be made, more taxes generated, more financing deals written and economic growth expanded.
The old boy in his 30 year old Metro that he has cherished and maintained while always leaving the house with a thermos of drink and home made sandwiches in the same container he has used for 30 years and who doesn’t jet off for foreign holidays nor have any desire to own the latest gadgetry. He is the environmentalist. It’s not the chap who wants the latest car, latest gadget, buys bottled water, buys pre-prepared foods, flies on holiday and buys everything that says it is environmental.
Phil. said:
Thanks Chris. Interesting.
All the figures used are US based and as one comment observes, the video uses an average of 500g CO2 emissions whereas in Europe the average emissions is nearer 150-160g CO2, which changes the comparative figures in the video by 2-3 times in the favour of fossil fueled cars.
The lithium mining issue was glossed over, and there was little mention of the environmental cost of mining fossil fuels.
This video reinforces the argument that the source of the electricity is absolutely key to the EV equation, and that driving a 100KW vehicle isn’t that helpful to the environment.
Small electric cars with (currently) limited ranges powered by renewable energy are definitely a good thing. However, replacing like for like our current transportation needs (cars and HGV’s) with EV’s is far less clear cut when it comes to environmental issues.
I’m not convinced that EV’s are the holy grail that some people are being led to believe they are, but nor do I think fossil fuel transportation is viable in the longer term. Whatever the eventual solution I think society will have to change (reduce) it’s need for individual transportation to which it has become accustomed over the last 50-60 years.
They are not but here is what is important: They are less polluting for wealthy people. Lithium is extracted in third world countries such as Chile. No one gives a damn if they are all poisened or their country is ruined. Cobalt comes from the DR Congo. That’s just a bit of land for the West and Asia to strip of its resources to fuel its economic growth. No one cares about the worthless humans that live there. And how the power is generated for EVs is totally irrelevant. Look at where power stations are situated. Next to a handful of poor people absolutely no one cares about. It really doesn’t matter if they all die as a result. All the figures used are US based and as one comment observes, the video uses an average of 500g CO2 emissions whereas in Europe the average emissions is nearer 150-160g CO2, which changes the comparative figures in the video by 2-3 times in the favour of fossil fueled cars.
The lithium mining issue was glossed over, and there was little mention of the environmental cost of mining fossil fuels.
This video reinforces the argument that the source of the electricity is absolutely key to the EV equation, and that driving a 100KW vehicle isn’t that helpful to the environment.
Small electric cars with (currently) limited ranges powered by renewable energy are definitely a good thing. However, replacing like for like our current transportation needs (cars and HGV’s) with EV’s is far less clear cut when it comes to environmental issues.
I’m not convinced that EV’s are the holy grail that some people are being led to believe they are, but nor do I think fossil fuel transportation is viable in the longer term. Whatever the eventual solution I think society will have to change (reduce) it’s need for individual transportation to which it has become accustomed over the last 50-60 years.
They are all expendable so as to achieve cleaner local air where we live. We are not expendable. We are much more important. If we need to poison 1000 third world children to reduce the risk of our child having a bit of asthma then done. Done in a heartbeat. Besides who do they think they are to tell us what we can or cannot buy?
I don’t think anyone sees EVs as the holy grail. I don’t think anyone realistically thinks they can replace ICE at any kind of enormous rate. They have their good points and their bad points and lots of us will be happy to migrate over to EV as and when appropriate as they are generally more efficient than the typesnofnICE alternatives being built but someone would have to be quite stupid or deluded to actually think they are an actual solution to anything significant.
ruggedscotty said:
The enviromentalists are foot stamping rebellionists, the ones that like to be a rebel and kick up the dust before they go back to their normal life, their little chance to be different and going against the norm.
The genie is out and big business don't know how best to deal with it, the GM EV1 terrified the motor industry, why else would it have been cancelled and destroyed as quickly. but thing was they opened the door and it got out. Can you imagine just what the electric car is going to do to the motor industry ? its going to rip it to pieces and they are going to have to start all over again. GM saw that and retracted very quickly from the table,
It wouldn't be impossible to buy an ev and never have to visit the garage again, what serviceable parts does it need ? with programming you wont even need brakes, the electric motor can slow you down as well as speed you up. So we will mourn the demise of a glorious V12 ? Honestly I don't think so, we wont mourn the expense of keeping a car on the road. Can you imagine 250,000 miles with only ever having to change tyres.... over 20 years of motoring only ever having to pay for electricity to recharge your battery....I know a bit wild but not that far from it..... fuel filters air filters spark plugs
Indeed but what I am saying is that it is important to understand that we could have been building ‘cars for life’ decades ago without EV. It’s important to actually separate the two and ask why we don’t make our cars to last longer. Before any ICE or EV can be sold on that basis first we need to comprehend why no one is interested in buying a vehicle that can last that long. The genie is out and big business don't know how best to deal with it, the GM EV1 terrified the motor industry, why else would it have been cancelled and destroyed as quickly. but thing was they opened the door and it got out. Can you imagine just what the electric car is going to do to the motor industry ? its going to rip it to pieces and they are going to have to start all over again. GM saw that and retracted very quickly from the table,
It wouldn't be impossible to buy an ev and never have to visit the garage again, what serviceable parts does it need ? with programming you wont even need brakes, the electric motor can slow you down as well as speed you up. So we will mourn the demise of a glorious V12 ? Honestly I don't think so, we wont mourn the expense of keeping a car on the road. Can you imagine 250,000 miles with only ever having to change tyres.... over 20 years of motoring only ever having to pay for electricity to recharge your battery....I know a bit wild but not that far from it..... fuel filters air filters spark plugs
The EV has much going for it in that it should be cheaper for us to own over its lifetime and less toxic to important local people but are we actually heading in that direction?
Max_Torque said:
I just want to mention that for vehicles with bi-directional powertrains (ie BEVs) their mass is actually largely irrelevant, as they can recover around 70% of the energy they use to accelerate that mass. That means todau, a 2,000kg Tesla is actually identical in terms of "losses due to mass" as a 600kg car, which todau, doesn't even exist (even an elise is around 900kg these days). So if you're applying your mass tax, then ICE are going to get absolutely taxed out of existence as they can't recover ANY of their KE.......
(what matters for BEVs is actually drag, and not mass, and while yes, drag does have a mass proportionate component, it's actually fairly small, and drag is dominated by aero loses mainly. So if we are going to tax things like that, then we need to tax CdA really!)
I’m more thinking about the amount of materials used and how that mass then impacts on wear and tear on not just the vehicle but also roads etc. Space taken up, the arms race to protect ever heavier vehicles. (what matters for BEVs is actually drag, and not mass, and while yes, drag does have a mass proportionate component, it's actually fairly small, and drag is dominated by aero loses mainly. So if we are going to tax things like that, then we need to tax CdA really!)
A car that is built using 50% less raw material, is less stressed by weight, exerts less wear on its surroundings and takes up less physical space is overall more beneficial than continuing to produce 2 tonne whales designed for 3 year credit deals.
We would all be better off if we started to end the absolutely enormous and recent cultural shift that has seen consumers completely naturalising the concept of a new toy every few years and these toys getting ever larger and heavier.
We aren’t talking lefty communism here but more a recognition that unfettered capitalism is just as dangerous and destructive.
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