WHY DYSON’S EV WAS CANCELLED · 911 TARGA
He used innovation and style to turn the vacuum cleaner and hand dryer markets upside down – what went wrong with the car?
We’ve sucked up al of the info on the £500m Dyson EV that never was. And the new 911 Targa, because you can never have too much Porsche
“Tesla hasn’t yet made a profit. The other carmakers are prepared to shoulder losses because selling EVs lowers their average emissions. We would have to compete with manufacturers that are happy to lose money making electric cars. I’ve got to make a profit. In the end I just deemed it too risky. It’s not fun making a product that doesn’t make money.” It’s almost banal isn’t it? Britain’s greatest inventor, its richest man, cancelled his electric car project not because it couldn’t be done, but because he foresaw it probably would have made him less rich.
You can’t fault Sir James Dyson’s commitment. He’d established an engineering centre for the car at a former RAF base in Hullavington, Wiltshire, where he employed 650 engineers, designers, marketers and the rest. He was ready to commit to a factory in Singapore. But then, having invested, by his own reckoning, £500 million, and actually driven the prototype, he hit the kill switch.
For Dyson to have started doing a car isn’t that surprising. An enthusiast who loves the inventiveness of the original Mini and drives a Phantom, he got ex-BMW marketing chief Ian Robertson on his board. And his firm has relevant experience: “We’ve got great people on electric motors. We did an excellent battery management system. Aerodynamics is quite a major part of what we do. So although we’d never made cars before, for the suspension, all that sort of thing, we were able to hire people and learn” he recently told The Sunday Times.
Sure enough, his claims for the electric performance are amazing, particularly its 600-mile range. This on an 800kg lithium-ion battery, which took this huge car (bigger than a LWB Range Rover) to 2.6 tonnes, he says.
It became known during the project that Dyson was working on transformative solid-state batteries. But he says they wouldn’t have been ready at first, so it would have launched with lithium-ion, with liquid cooling as per other high-performance EVs. “But subsequently it would have had solid-state batteries. They would start to solve the big problem of range and cost and disposability after life. You get more power into a smaller space. They don’t heat up, so shouldn’t require cooling, and are much more pleasant to dispose of.”
Other stats? “There are two 200kWh electric motors, one in the front, one in the rear. Power was 536bhp and torque 480lb ft. Acceleration 0-62mph: 4.8sec. Top speed 125mph.” Carbon fibre? “Not a thread. It’s aluminium.” There’s air suspension, with lots of ground clearance, and wheels are tall, with narrow tyres – good for ride, rolling resistance and drag. Mirrors are cameras, like the Audi e-tron, and the glazing and door handles are flush.
“FOR DYSON TO HAVE STARTED DOING A CAR ISN’T THAT SURPRISING”
“DYSON HAS BROUGHT HIS OWN OBSESSIONS INTO THE CABIN”
Autonomy, like solid-state batteries, isn’t ready. The car had “lane control and all that. But not so that you take your hands off the wheel. I think full self-drive is still quite a long way off.” In other ways he believes there will be fast car-industry change. He still feels that ending sales of internal combustion cars by 2030 is “absolutely doable”.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dyson has brought his own inventions and obsessions into the cabin. “The top of the dashboard is low. I wanted a commanding vision [he’s a Range Rover fan]. The steering wheel features lots of buttons, including neutral and reverse – no controls on stalks, and nothing to lean forward for. The key information is in the head-up display. I didn’t want one of those distracting big screens.
“The seats are thin and have round circular headrests. I don’t like those Thirties armchair-style car seats everyone uses that you sink into. There’s a gap at the base of the seat and you press your bottom into it – the seat has proper lumbar support. There are stretch fabric cupholders, iPad pockets everywhere, and a gap under the console where you can store a rucksack. A filing cabinet-style bin pulls out of the central console in the middle row.”
The 3m wheelbase, plus coach doors, helps space and access. “You can open the coach doors and walk inside straight through to the other side. That gave us room for three rows of seats, particularly important for China.” It doesn’t, though, have Airblade-style jets instead of windscreen wipers. “No, that doesn’t work.”
And the price? Dyson is a premium brand with all its products, and the car would have been no different, costing around £150,000. Gulp. A seven-seat airsuspended aluminium-bodied high-performance long-range crossover sounds a good idea. But as Tesla’s Model X has shown since 2015, it’s been had before. The Tesla can’t do 600 miles, but it has a reliable rapidcharge network at little more than half that price.
Despite Dyson’s talent, there’s a lot that isn’t surprising here – there are some lovely details, but in principle the car is little different from the Model X, or a box-tailed version of the Jaguar I-Pace. The body – snub nose, long glasshouse, seven seats, tall, thin wheels – looks like a show car for a next-gen Espace.
Despite his manufacturing expertise, and planning to make it in a low-cost country, Singapore, the sheer investment heft to get a car into production is more than any individual can really stomach. After all, he’d done the cheap bit, developing the car. The expensive bit, building and tooling the plant, was still to come. And all this in an industry where few make the kind of margins you can get on a vacuum cleaner. Clearly, Dyson has proved what has long been the case: being very clever and very rich aren’t sufficient for successfully starting a car company.
Still, he’s sanguine. “The first feeling is of huge sadness at stopping, and that people we have brought in have to go somewhere else. But we move on. Ours is a life of huge risk. We try things all day long and they almost all fail. We got an influx of talent, many of whom have stayed on to work on other new products. We’re all a little bit wiser from the experience.” Paul Horrell