> Electric cars are considerably more expensive to make and manufacturers are making big losses on the sale of each car. This is rather disingenuous. The Model 3 was one of the most popular new cars sold in the UK last year, Tesla isn’t losing money on those sales. You can’t do a market analysis that ignores the main competitor. If I had to hazard a guess, the real reason James Dyson pulled the plug is a) EV developm…
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,…
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.