In Hullavington, a small town in Wiltshire in south-central England, there is a large airfield: at the time of the Second World War it was used as a training area for pilots and as a base for about a thousand Royal Air aircraft. Force. Part of its facilities, including two huge hangars, was recently purchased by Dyson not to build new futuristic vacuum cleaners and hair dryers, but a futuristic electric car.
Sir James Dyson, founder and owner of the company, has in fact decided that the next product he will put on sale will be an electric car different from all the others in circulation so far. The plan – which includes investments of more than 2.5 billion pounds (2.78 billion euros) in various fields of research – could lead his company to a new global success, or destroy it forever due to large expenses and complexity of a market such as that of the automobile. At 71, Dyson does not seem to be too worried about this possibility, convinced that in a few years with his engineers he can build from scratch the electric car that everyone would want to buy, as it was in the past for its vacuum cleaners.
This week Dyson announced plans to build a test track, also at the former airfield facilities in Wiltshire, which is expected to have an overall length of around 15 kilometers. The track will be connected to the two large hangars that the company has already renovated, to give new spaces to engineers and researchers working on the new electric car. Overall, Dyson expects to invest around 200 million pounds (222 million euros) in the redevelopment of part of the airfield. About 400 people work in the structures already set up, to which several hundreds more will be added, who will have 15 thousand square meters at their disposal in which to build and test the various prototypes.
Dyson announced plans to build an electric car in late September 2017, but without giving any other details. After a year, things have not changed much: the characteristics and price of the new vehicle continue to be a mystery. In an interview with the UK edition of GQ magazine, James Dyson said: “What we are doing is quite radical.” He then confirmed that the first electric car model will be ready to go on sale by 2021. The deadline announced by Dyson suggests that development work is already at an advanced stage, although no prototype has been presented at the moment. and it seems that the same company has not yet made even one for internal use and fully functional.
However, the development methods of the new vehicle are not surprising: they are very similar to those used in the past for the company's household appliances. Like Apple, Dyson also carries out its projects without providing previews, experimenting in parallel with multiple models before arriving at a definitive version. The company works on around 200 projects, some of which are interconnected, in a building dedicated to research and development that can only be entered using a fingerprint scanner. The work is done almost exclusively by engineers bound by confidentiality obligations in their contracts. Dyson spends an average of 8 million pounds (almost 9 million euros) each week on research and development of new products. Most engineers work in the UK and the company employs 11,750 people globally.
Many describe James Dyson as a control freak obsessed with accuracy. Convinced that a better vacuum cleaner than those on the market could be built – which lost suction power as their bag filled with dust – Dyson built 5,127 different prototypes in his home garage before arriving at a result that he considered optimal. It was the early eighties and no one seemed to be interested in his invention: his vacuum cleaner was not commercially interesting, because it would have deprived the producers of the revenues deriving from the sale of the bags. Dyson did not give up and finally decided to manufacture its own vacuum cleaner, founding the company that bears his name in 1991.
In 27 years of operation, Dyson has grown enormously to become one of the richest and most innovative companies in the UK, with an estimated value of around £ 9.5 billion (€ 10.6 billion). The company is not listed on the stock exchange and its ownership is in the hands of James Dyson, who does not seem to be very worried about the size of the investments that will require the development and production of an electric car: “Since I have not sold any action, my heritage is linked to society and in a way I like to live on a tightrope. It ensures that there is always adrenaline flowing. It's a bit of a weird thing to do, I think. It is certainly not for everyone, but the adrenaline that involves taking a great risk, living on a razor's edge, helps to always stay on the alert “.
James Dyson's interest in electric cars dates back to many years ago, when there was still little talk and less concreteness of the possibility of using electric motors instead of petrol and diesel ones. In the years immediately following the construction of its first vacuum cleaner, Dyson began to wonder what alternatives could be found to diesels, whose exhaust gases produce large amounts of dust. By the standards of the time, however, diesel was considered “clean” and Dyson gave up, focusing on developing new products for the home: cordless vacuum cleaners, bladeless fans, more efficient hand dryers and room purifiers capable of eliminating 99.97 per cent of allergens and polluting dusts.
All products that have been a success in their sector, even if much more expensive than those of the competition. James Dyson would also like to repeat himself in automobiles, producing highly refined and technologically advanced electric vehicles, which probably few can afford. Dyson's electric car will be expensive and high-end, not comparable to the budget models that some automakers have started producing, such as Nissan. A Dyson car could be priced close to the most valuable Teslas, which cost more than $ 100,000. For now James Dyson does not seem to be interested in the mass market, perhaps also in light of the gigantic difficulties that his potential main competitor is facing.
In fact, very pessimistic articles and analyzes have been published for months on Tesla, engaged in the production of the Model 3, its first car designed for the mass market. Company CEO Elon Musk confided that he was under tremendous pressure amidst production delays, missed deadlines, stock market speculation and growing pessimism on the part of investors about Tesla's ability to produce profits and stem losses over the past year. . Producing a car on a large scale requires a lot of resources, large investments and well-organized networks of suppliers and distributors: it is no coincidence that there are so few car companies for the mass market around the world.
It is unclear how Dyson could organize in such a short time (a couple of years) a viable system to produce cars, albeit on a much smaller scale than Tesla's. However, the British company could have a technological advantage over the competition: more reliable batteries.
In 2015 James Dyson acquired Sakti3, a Michigan (United States) company specializing in the development of solid-state batteries, safer and more reliable technology than the lithium-ion batteries commonly used in smartphones and dozens of other products. Dyson hasn't provided much information on the progress of its research in the industry since the acquisition of Sakti3, but many speculate that it used the company's patents to develop its own solutions, with better yield.
At GQ, Dyson admitted that they have an alternative solution for batteries, which would have a major advantage over the competition, but still maintain a lot of caution: “You never know with this kind of thing. Some problems can always come up suddenly. It is a complex thing to develop and even more to build “. Dyson would also like all components of its electric car to be built in-house, in order to minimize dependence on external suppliers, which add many variables and can affect the performance and quality of production, as demonstrated by the case of Tesla. Even if it has less than a traditional car, an electric vehicle is still made up of a myriad of parts and it is unclear how Dyson could build each component independently.
But Dyson's plans do not stop at the ground: more reliable and faster-to-charge batteries could prove to be the solution to building airplanes with electric motors, reducing the aviation industry's dependence on fossil fuels, its main expense. Before arriving in the clouds, however, Dyson will have to prove that it is capable of building its electric car, remaining with its feet on the ground.
