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Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

I agree that the comment is disingenuous, however, I believe the problem for Dyson was that the car he wanted to make was just too expensive. It's not necessarily the case that all electric vehicles are too expensive (and clearly when you look at the EVs in SE Asia, there are some pretty cheap cars). I'd be surprised if he didn't already anticipate the upfront costs. I think it's more that having made the prototype, he realised he couldn't make a product that will disrupt the market at a reasonable price and therefore threw in the towel.

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> he realised he couldn't make a product that will disrupt the market at a reasonable price

Dyson's whole lifelong strategy is to disrupt the product and the price. When his vacuum cleaner came out the price was astronomically expensive. People were dumfounded - who would pay so much? But the product was better and people accepted the new price. It still seems high today but it was so successful it somewhat permanently moved the needle on what people think was reasonable.

He also tried this with: fans, washing machines, hair dryers, hand dryers. Some less successful, but an unexpectedly or apparently unreasonably high price is probably deliberately part of his approach.

The crucial difference between those markets and the auto market is that consumers already have an idea of the value of autos across the range of prices. Even a teenager tooling around in a used Civic could tell you why his car cost $4000 and why a Lambo is 6 figures. Meanwhile, while I'm sure there were luxury or industrial vacuums, fans, etc., before Dyson's, most couldn't tell you their cost, nor what features justified that cost, to Dyson's advantage. With cars, though, he can't just say, "These are the features you'll get, and this is what I'll sell it to you for," because people will just point to other, similarly-priced cars and say, "How come it doesn't have [premium feature] like this one?".

Maybe the problem is that cars can't be compared to household appliances when it comes to consumer behavior. Spending more for an appliance that you believe will last longer and be more powerful then a cheaper variation might feel like a smart buy. There are so many more variables when buying a car however.

I think the scale of the products also plays a big part. A $500 hair dryer is really expensive (and for a hair dryer!), but $500 is the kind of money a lot of people have around, or could pull together if they wanted to. If you have a car that's 10x more than a 'normal' car you're looking at $200k+ which is not a price that's accessible to a huge majority of people. In other words, the dyson model of 'make something better and charge way more for it' doesn't seem to fit particularly well to cars because you end up with no market.

This is very true: and it's also the Tesla strategy. Which is a problem for Dyson because there's already an expensive premium product in the market.

> he realised he couldn't make a product that will disrupt the market at a reasonable price

Most likely because of batteries. He doesn’t have volume to build his own battery factories, but buying in small quantities makes his cars expensive. Now if car you are trying to sell is more expensive than Model X or Cybertruck, customers naturally would ask “Why?”

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