Why he’s ditched plans to build an electric car
James Dyson has abandoned plans to release his big, longrange electric car – but not before the venture drained him of £500m. Here, in his own words, is the story of what went wrong
This is the first one that ran. I drove it secretly in a screened-off compound we have here,’ says Sir James Dyson. It is 11am on an early spring day at Dyson’s new research centre in Wiltshire, and Britain’s best-known innovator – and now Britain’s richest person, according to The Sunday Times Rich List published in May – is showing off his most keenly anticipated invention. Keenly anticipated, that is, until he scrapped it. He calls it N526, its code name, but to you and me it’s the Dyson car.
This is the first time he has shown the seven-seat electric SUV, which claims a 600-mile range, to anyone outside his firm. It’s also the first time he has confessed how devastated he is that it won’t take to the road. ‘There’s huge sadness and disappointment. Ours is a life of risk and of failure,’ he says. ‘We try things and they fail. Life isn’t easy.’
His pain was initially eased by his decision to retool the former RAF base at Hullavington, which he had spent £250m renovating to become the development and test site for the car, to develop instead a new kind of ventilator to help the NHS cope with the coronavirus pandemic. In the end it was not needed; additional ventilators were sourced elsewhere. Dyson, who spent £20m on the project and has not accepted any government aid to support his business, hopes the ventilator will be used in other countries.
Dyson has had setbacks before. He scrapped his washing machine five years after it went on sale because it cost too much to manufacture, but the car is a failure of epic proportions. Not only has he axed it before going into production, it has cost him £500m of his own money. Dyson is a private company. It is a salutary reminder that in a world in which billionaires tend to get richer in their sleep, they can still screw up royally.
It’s a shame because the car is – was – special, largely because of Dyson’s battery engineers, who have spent decades developing high-power, quiet, quick-charging cells for everything from cordless vacuum cleaners to hair straighteners.
‘This is the lithium-ion pack,’ Dyson says, proudly running his fingers over the copper cylinders, all 8500 of them. It would have given the car the kind of range that would make all of us want to dump our diesels and petrols in a heartbeat: ‘600 miles on a single charge,’ he says. Even in February, on the far side of 70mph, with the heater on and the radio at full blast? ‘Yes. Yes.’
That range was not achieved by making a light, small car. The Dyson is huge – 5m long, 2m wide and almost 2m tall. It weighs 2600kg, even though the body is made of aluminium. But it still looks sporty. ‘The windscreen rakes back more steeply than a Ferrari’s,’ Dyson says, smiling. He reckons the wheels on the finished N526 would be bigger than on any production car on the market. They wear quiet-running tyres that, he says, ‘give low rolling resistance for economy yet excellent ride. You can ride bumps and potholes more easily.’
To improve aerodynamic e¡ciency there are two big scoops on the front and rear flanks, and the electric door handles are hidden underneath a panel that runs the length of the car. The tailgate is split as on a Range Rover, which is one of the cars Dyson owns – although today he’s driving a Rolls-Royce Phantom. Ian Robertson, former CEO of Rolls-Royce, serves on Dyson’s board, and suggested he get one.
The interior of the Dyson is not like any other car you’ve ever sat in. The slim, firmly upholstered seats have round headrests that resemble lollipops. ‘I hate those armchair-style seats that you sink into because there’s never enough lumbar support and you get back pain,’ Dyson frowns. All the controls are buttons on the steering wheel. ‘No stalks.’ Instead of instrument panels and infotainment touchscreens on the dash, almost all information – speed, time, navigation – floats in front of the driver’s eyes like a hologram, ‘so you never have to take your eyes off the road’.
As with any Dyson product, there are design quirks. Between the front seats is a mesh-covered space for a small bag. Behind it, a filing cabinet-style storage bin pulls out into the footwell of the middle row of seats. The air vents, which use Dyson’s air filtration system to keep dirt and pollutants out of the cabin, run around the car to create a more even temperature.
I want one – so why can’t I, he, or anyone else have one? Money killed the car. ‘Electric cars are very expensive to make. The battery, battery management, electronics and cooling are much more expensive than an internal combustion engine,’ Dyson explains. The car would need to be priced at £150,000 to break even, far more than electric models from the big car makers, which subsidise costs with sales of traditional petrol and diesel cars.
BMW, Mercedes, Audi and Jaguar Land Rover are, he says, ‘making huge losses’ on every electric car they sell. ‘They’re doing it because it lowers their average emissions overall, helping them to comply with EU legislation. I ⊲
JAMES DYSON
‘There’s huge disappointment. We try things and they fail. Life isn’t easy’
‘When other companies started producing electric cars at a loss it became too risky’
JAMES DYSON
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.’
From the day the car was announced, some critics insisted it was a vanity project doomed to failure. They point out that Tesla – hailed as a success by many – has burnt through $19bn of investor cash, but is still not profitable. ‘It was never a goer, given the massive capital requirements,’ argues David Bailey, professor of business economics at Birmingham Business School at Birmingham University.
‘It was not a vanity project at all,’ Dyson retorts. ‘When we started in 2014 we had good technology and a very ecient car with a long range. It was viable. But when, later, other companies started producing electric cars at a loss, it became too risky for us.’
All is not lost. Many of the 500 people working on the car have stayed on to drive research into batteries, robotics, air treatment and lighting. ‘The car people are a talent influx,’ says Dyson. They have certainly livened up the car park at Hullavington, now brimming with sports cars. He is still investing the £2.5bn earmarked for the car across his business in Britain and overseas, including opening a new research base in Singapore.
Ah, Singapore. When Dyson announced 15 months ago he was moving his firm’s head oce there, it sparked accusations that he was a tax-dodging Brexiteer abandoning Britain when the going got tough. He bristles at the suggestion. ‘We didn’t “move to” Singapore. That expression is wrong. There are only three or four key people there – CEO, finance, legal. We’ve grown our head count in Britain since the announcement and now have 5000 people here developing products for Europe and North America.’
So why do it? It was bound to generate bad press. ‘Asia is the fastest-growing market in the world and already accounts for 50 per cent of our sales. Asians love new technology, that latest thing, and absolutely “get” design. If you are designing things for people in Asia, you should be in Asia. You’ve got to live it and breathe it; to think like Asians. It would be arrogant to think that we can imagine products for that market sitting here in Wiltshire. We needed to be headquartered in Asia.’
Besides, investing in Asia is what British firms should be doing post-Brexit, he believes. ‘Let’s embrace the world, not just look to Europe. And let’s welcome talent from all over the world, not just from Europe.’ All Dyson products are manufactured in Asia – in Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, and Dyson spends one-third of his time there. He had planned to make the Dyson car in Asia, too, in a new factory in Singapore.
Did the very personal criticism – he was accused of ‘staggering hypocrisy’ by Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran – hurt? ‘A little bit. But life is like that. You can keep quiet and say nothing, then maybe you won’t get criticised in the press. But I can’t quite do that because I believe in free trade.’
Despite scrapping the car, Dyson still thinks he can succeed in the car market by making the solid-state batteries that will power other manufacturers’ models. ‘Batteries need to be much more dense, so you get more power into smaller spaces,’ he says. Solid-state cells are the key because they are more energy-ecient than lithium-ion ones and also much smaller and lighter. They generate a lot less heat, so don’t require complex and costly cooling systems, nor do they have a nasty habit of exploding. They’re easier to recycle too.
As he walks past the robotic white gantries that would have served as the first production line for his car, Dyson says: ‘Other people are developing solid-state batteries. We may be the first. If what we’re doing turns out to be suitable for other people, then that’s an option.’ The government wants to ban sales of all fossil-fuel cars by 2035. Can this be done? ‘Yeah, it’s absolutely do-able. In fact, 2030 is do-able. I hate diesel.’
It’s time to put the black dust sheets back on the Dyson, but before we head back out into the West Country sunshine, I ask if he might ever have another go at a car. ‘I wouldn’t say no, but the commercial circumstances would have to be right,’ he says without hesitation. ‘The garage door never closes,’ he says, closing the garage door.