James Dyson says he spent £500M of his own money on the company’s canceled EV
theverge.com
theverge.com
This is a company that essentially has exclusively been selling different iterations of air blowers. I get why a hoover company thought branching out into hair dryers and fancy bladeless fans, I just fail to see the steps between that and a fully blown electric vehicle. They seem to have the Apple business model where they're selling a premium version of normal products and its an amazing money spinner, but their forays into technology outside of their core competence seems very strange.
Oh and also it's a very strange title, because Dyson is a privately owned company, so whilst its news that the amount spent was £500m, it's obviously going to be his own money, he owns the company.
If it's too expensive that is clearly poor engineering.
it's a cute sentiment, but it throws out on-the-edge engineering work that produces little product, or engineering that is subsidized elsewhere where the cash value is of little importance.
For example, I never thought the fine folks engineering at NASA were idiots, nor the people at defense groups like Northrop Grumman -- but i'd hardly call their wares a good 'cash value'.
Could equally be considered poor engineering but might be looked on slightly more charitably.
Think they underestimated how eye-wateringly expensive it is to start producing cars (many thousands of parts from many hundereds of suppliers) without so much as a sniff of people putting deposits down etc. to confirm market demand.
No doubt if they showed a car off at geneva motor show they could get a decent order book even off hype alone for the first 6 months.
Once they had the drivetrain down and some sales they could raise money for the factories or buy a flagging automaker
In 1985 Hoover manufactured 14,000 electric vehicles in their Welsh factory - the Sinclair C5. It was a disaster, but as a sub-contractor Hoover didn't do too badly out of it.