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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

The thing that mystifies me about the electric car move is it was such a bold move into such a different area with seemingly no justification and failed incredibly quickly. It went from conception, to manufacturing to discontinued in 2 years.

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.

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They rapidly hired staff from Lotus, Aston Martin, Jaguar land rover, and many others to try to set up their supply chain, engineering, and manufacturing capabilities. They could get 'the right' kind of people in.

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.

> 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.

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.

They should have followed Tesla and started with different manufacturer's chassis. The Tesla Roadster was just a Lotus Elise with electric drivetrain and stylistic changes to some panels.

Once they had the drivetrain down and some sales they could raise money for the factories or buy a flagging automaker

Its not clear they failed on the technology/engineering front? It was a hard sell - expensive, heavy (5000lbs!). Marketing of autos is clearly a very different thing (dealerships? seasonal dips? advertising?) and there they may have exceeded their reach.

Not to mention building a service network. People are going to expect a lot of regional white glove shops for a $100k truck and it's not easy to find enough qualified EV techs.

A competent take to market plan would have included engineering towards a price point that customers would stomach.

If it's too expensive that is clearly poor engineering.

Reminds me of a video I was watching on AvE's YouTube channel, must have been his Juicero video, where he said something along the lines of how any idiot can make a high quality product by using expensive materials, but good engineering is bring a high quality product to market at an attractive price.

>any idiot can make a high quality product by using expensive materials, but good engineering is bring a high quality product to market at an attractive price.

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'.

A slightly different read given what they said is that they didn't realise that legacy automakers would take advantage of production mandates to snuff out new entrants by selling as few subsidized EVs as they were forced to delay progress as long as possible.

Could equally be considered poor engineering but might be looked on slightly more charitably.

First adopters don't care about the price and actually use it as symbol of value.

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