When Dyson announced that it was building a car in 2017, we described it as a moonshot for good reason. Not only were the hurdles many and manifestly hard to jump, but Dyson himself was dismissive of the global car-building business and what it could teach his vacuum-making firm about the business of building cars. Even at the time, and with the firm's engineering expertise as counterweight, the bullishness was patently nonsense. Two years later, Dyson folded the project on the basis that "we simply cannot make (the car) commercially viable." Imagine the shock not reverberating across the boardrooms of the mighty.
Now, thanks to his arrival at the zenith of the Sunday Times Rich List, Dyson has revealed a little more about the abject failure. The car, dubbed N526 and apparently at the development mule stage, was a seven-seat SUV powered by a brace of 200kW electric motors delivering a combined 543hp and 480lb ft of torque, and capable of 0-62mph in 4.8 seconds. No real surprises, there; the kicker was its range, Dyson pulling a projected 600 miles from his hat.
If true, how had his fiendishly clever engineers delivered the Tesla-bettering distance? With the long-promised efficiency of newly created solid-state batteries? Nope, the N526 was apparently equipped with lithium-ion cells. It seems it just came with vastly many more of them, which is something you can do when your environmentally-friendly electric vehicle is five metres long, two metres wide and 1.7 metres tall. And weighs 2.6 tons. Figures which make it only slightly smaller than a Rolls-Royce Cullinan, and just as portly.
When Tesla claimed a 600-mile range for the forthcoming Tesla Roadster (also in 2017), everyone said it wasn't possible because the concept wasn't physically large enough to incorporate the necessary batteries. Dyson evidently overcame that problem with one of the oldest tricks in the venerable car manufacturer playbook: it just made the packaging bigger. And didn't allow itself to become overly concerned when the result weighed the equivalent of two Volkswagen T-Rocs.
What stopped it was the realisation that it couldn't build said aircraft carrier for a price that anyone was going to be willing to pay. Well, the accounting department of a large car manufacturer could've told Dyson that three years ago, on the basis of, y'know, their previous century of building cars to cost. Regardless, the reasoning is only half true; consumers have proven themselves well prepared to pay colossal sums for large SUVs, the Cullinan among them. Dyson just figured it couldn't build enough of them to scale - or there wouldn't be sufficient customers to buy the ones they did make.
Rather than blame his uber-smart organisation for such a foreseeable snafu, Dyson's fallback position - as elucidated to the Sunday Times - is that the big car manufacturers helped ruin things for his big not-a-car by building and selling EVs people actually wanted to buy for a price they could potentially afford. "(They) are making huge losses on every electric car they sell", he explains. "They're doing it because it lowers their average CO2 and NO2 emissions overall, helping them to comply with EU legislation. I don't have a fleet. I've got to make a profit on each car or I'd jeopardise the whole company. In the end it was too risky."
Again, this was already obvious to all and sundry three years ago. The sneaky car manufacturers were already in the process of making the ramped-up production of EVs work for them - and consumers - by virtue of their size and expertise. Two things Dyson never had, or could have hoped to have with such a short run up. Moreover, the whole exercise depended on Dyson not emulating established car makers (the one kernel of truth in the firm's disregard for them) but in doing something (anything) in a more innovative way - something it clearly failed to do.
Or perhaps it did. It seems unlikely that within the firm's preposterously large SUV there isn't a shred of novelty - after all, my Dyson vacuum does a better job than a much cheaper product. Perhaps the ultimate failure was the professed allergy to risk. Dyson makes no mention of the one major manufacturer which best mirrors his own; Tesla has proven itself consistently willing to take dramatic, winner-take-all, size-defying chances to earn its place at the head of the pack. With an established firm to protect, Dyson was unwilling to do the same.
That's understandable - commendable even, when there are other people's livelihoods on the line. But it does mean cycling back to what precisely the point of the whole endeavour was, which according to Dyson himself, cost half a billion pounds of his own money. Vanity was not at the root of it, he says, but it's hard not to see the project that way - unless you simply accept it as arrogant and wrongheaded from the outset. Early reports of Dyson's attempt at a medical-grade ventilator suggest the company was similarly inflicted with an inability to grasp the innumerable challenges presented to it. Or else suffered from an aversion to acknowledging that someone else knew better.
Either way, the reversal of course (and the expense of it) hasn't done Dyson much harm - the company or the man. The former has ended up with the huge Hullavington facility and a CEO who once ran Infiniti; the latter has achieved the title of richest person in the UK, and didn't need a seven-seat SUV to get him there. At the very least he ought to have some hard-won advice for Sir Jim Ratcliffe, fifth on the list and still forging ahead with his plan to build a Defender-like SUV. Although the announcement late last year that Ineos Automotive has since partnered with renowned manufacturing giant Magna Steyr suggests that his fellow billionaire has already learnt the salient lesson of Dyson's failure.
Previously reported, 27.09.17
Dyson's proposed entry into the car market is to be applauded for a multitude of reasons. Firstly, the industry thrives on competition and suffers from too little of it when manufacturers all pull too benignly in the same direction. One only needs to measure the seismic effect of Tesla's impact in the States to understand that the arrival of a well-funded, belligerently maverick and technically sophisticated rival contributes to the pace of innovation across the board.
Secondly, large car companies are generally conservative by design and react cautiously to the idea of utilizing new or radically different ideas. Smaller upstarts - particularly those heralding from Silicon Valley or anywhere else used to the fast pace of technological advancement - are well practiced at shorter life cycles and the idea that creative thinking today is the lifeblood of tomorrow's success.
Thirdly, while Dyson's manufacturing base is abroad, its brain trust is located in Britain. And despite punching above its weight in design and engineering terms, the nation lacks a homegrown, home-owned car builder of any genuine scale. Particularly one focused solely on producing the kind of zero-emission personal mobility solutions that will likely be in much higher demand ten years hence.
Fourthly, to meet that aim requires tremendous nous, guts, strategic aptitude, an international presence and an unimaginably large pile of money: all qualities Dyson can feasibly claim to possess. But - and this is a colossal but - the car, be it electrically powered or not, is not a vacuum cleaner, a hand dryer, a hair dryer or a fan. For the vast majority of people, it is the most complicated and expensive item they will ever come into daily contact with.
A modern cheap-to-buy, cheap-to-run, mainstream supermini is not merely a chassis, body, engine and wheels; it is the all-singing, all-dancing result of decades worth of investment and material advancement. It works so spectacularly well today because previous generations didn't; their faults and foibles merciless logged, analyzed, rethought and fixed.
This process involves not only monstrous financial heft and the absurd complexity of mass production, but also the diligent work of thousands, a fair proportion of them with careers built around the experience of perfecting no more than a handful of components. Consequently, the suggestion that existing car makers have nothing to contribute to Dyson's development process, and that the firm intends to 'go it alone' is, at very best, disingenuous.
News that the firm has already taken on 'hundreds' of specialists from the automotive industry is plainly a tacit admission of that real-world fact. But Dyson will need many hundreds more. Apple, for example, it of G7-sized resources, has reputedly had a similar number of staff looking at personal mobility for years - and thus far proceeded no further with a car than propagating a vague internet rumour.
Google, among others, has been publically working on driverless cars for even longer - often suggesting that making the leap to full autonomy will pay off quicker than an incremental approach - but for all the millions of test miles completed, its solution remains staunchly over the horizon and wholly dependent upon the acquiescence of governments.
Even mighty Tesla, now as far into the stratosphere as any start-up could reasonably hope to ascend from a standing start, owes a significant chunk of its earliest work not to the dreamers of Palo Alto but rather to the engineers of Norfolk; Lotus famously instructing the fledgling upstart on how it might overcome the physical and mechanical challenge of combining a sports car with an undertray full of laptop batteries.
Dyson, by its own admission, is not building a sports car. It hasn't really made it clear what it is building, except to say that it will be radically different. If that difference is attained by virtue of solid-state batteries - the lighter, smaller, faster-charging and longer-lasting alternative to the current lithium-ion standard, and a likely avenue of its research - then that might conceivably be true. Certainly you can expect the final product to be created in the company's long-cherished image: glossy, ingenious, confident, polychromatic and cannily pragmatic. As well as, you'd assume, hugely expensive.
But to begin with it will be none of those things. First it will need to be summoned from the drawing board. Then it will need to falter and probably fail. To be trialed and tested and found wanting. Then to be improved, polished, retested and refined. Then it must be built in small numbers, to the same precise standard, and prove exceptionally good at conveying people in the quiet, comfortable and convenient manner to which they've become accustomed.
For the British firm to achieve all this by 2020 (even allowing for its apparent start in 2015) when it suggests production will begin, will necessitate a monumental - possibly unprecedented - effort and require the input of many who have been there and done it all before; the vast majority from within the industry that James Dyson tends to allude to with disdain.
Given the prerequisite speed of development, that same lovable throng of massive, multi-national, multi-talented and ferociously competitive manufacturers will know soon enough just how seriously they need to take Dyson's latest bright idea. And so will we.
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