Dyson scraps electric car project
Dyson, the electric technology company that’s famous for its vacuum cleaners among other electric appliances, has announced that they’re pulling the plug on their electric car project.
By autoX Editorial
Four years after it launched its electric car project, Dyson ends its EV plans, citing it's not commercially viable!
Dyson, the electric technology company that’s famous for its vacuum cleaners among other electric appliances, has announced that they’re pulling the plug on their electric car project. According to the company founder and CEO James Dyson, they’ve junked their EV plans because it wasn’t ‘commercially viable’.
For the uninitiated, Dyson’s EV dreams began in 2015 when the company started its automotive division. Over the course of these four years, the company employed over 500 people in its automotive division in the UK and announced £2.5 billion investment into the project. The company was supposed to launch its first electric car in 2020, but this was delayed by another year as Dyson decided to move the EV manufacturing plant to Singapore. Early this year, Dyson also published patents of their EV, which showed that it’s a large and practical crossover. Now, though, it seems none of this will ever materialise...
That said, in his official statement, the CEO did mention that they went through a ‘serious process to find a buyer for the project’, but to no avail. However, Dyson said that they will continue the research and development of relative automotive projects, such as solid-state batteries, which can also be shared with the company’s other household businesses.
Dyson’s decision to call it quits on its EV project shows the ugly side of the electric car business yet again. You see, the research and development costs are high, the batteries cost a bomb and the input costs are ever increasing. And all of this, of course, gets subsequently forwarded to customers in one way or the other, as and when they buy an EV. And even if a firm manages to sail through all these difficulties, it’s not an easy task to lure ‘conventional’ car buyers to trust in new car brand. The only electric car brand that has been able to catch the imagination of car buyers around the world is perhaps Tesla, but even they had to burn through millions and millions of dollars – and they continue to do so – just to sustain in the market. And this is when their product range is full of desirable and stellar cars!
On top of all of this, major carmakers like Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, et al, are now rapidly entering the EV space. The big guys, of course, benefit from the ‘economies of scale’ meaning using their vast resources and experience in the auto industry, they’re coming up with more competitive and better all-round electric cars. So, for a newbie to enter into this space, manage the production costs and then fight with the heavyweights of the industry, it was always going to be a very difficult road for Dyson. Their decision to pull out of the EV project then seems justified, atleast on their part...
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