It seems they really got out of their depth with this project. There are a lot of photos and videos of aesthetic things that (arguably) Dyson is good at such as the steering wheel user interface, the shaping of the wheel rims and the colour palettes for the paint job. But there is very little evidence of hard engineering, only one grainy video of the prototype car actually running (the other videos appearing to be th…
Dude! This has got to be the same with software -- with software it's 100x harder to design the process than the software or at least an order of magnitude wouldn't you say?
Moved company to Singapore to pay less taxes while pushing for Brexit because UK's lost sovereignty and the "EU tax". Good vacuums but he's a douche.
Good vacuums? Where? Reliability issues and the plastic chassis broke not long after purchase. I won't pay the premium again, that's for sure.
Totally, have a V-something cordless and the whole thing is just plastic. Even the hinges and stressed parts on the charging dock, I'm just waiting for it to snap.
> 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…
"The Model 3 was one of the most popular new cars sold in the UK last year"
I think that's overstating things a bit, it's not even in the top ten?
> Things like app connectivity are after thoughts and not core to their products. Good! God help us the day something like a fan or a vacuum cleaner needs "app connectivity".
A "connected" fan definitely has its uses, especially if it can sense if I'm in the room or not. "Connected" vacuums are already here, but they're called Roomba, not Dyson.
> 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 permanent…
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.
Interesting how the battery container is a stressed member of the chassis, I don't think any other manufacturer is doing that.
In Teslas the battery container also is structural, or a stressed member of the chassis as you put it.
There are many aspects here copied from Tesla or coincidentally the same, although he conveniently leaves out mentioning that fact at any opportunity. For example the lowering of the car at speed... copied from Model S.
Good vacuums? Where? Reliability issues and the plastic chassis broke not long after purchase. I won't pay the premium again, that's for sure.
Totally, have a V-something cordless and the whole thing is just plastic. Even the hinges and stressed parts on the charging dock, I'm just waiting for it to snap.
Their design mantra seems to be "plastic everything".
I could understand if they did it to keep prices low... But they aren't cheap products.
I could maybe understand it if they did it to keep things light or eco-friendly, but dysons structural plastic parts are thick and heavier than a metal equivilent part.
Vehicles are weird. I feel like we try to jam all use cases into one, when I really need three different things: 1/ To go to work and back. Same route everyday. Not very long. Currently use a bicycle, but I’ve used mass transit for these very common in-out routes in the past. 2/ Small local journeys. I can’t collect 6kg of wheat from the local farm with a bike or a bus. Taxi is viable if I could get them to wait 20 m…
B and C were solved by plug-in hybrids; on electricity they would do up to 50 miles (or thereabouts) which is fine for the errands you mentioned, and when more power or range is required the ICE is fired up.
Hybrids and plug-in hybrids have all but died though, now that they're no longer subsidized, and as it turns out they're not actually that good at carbon emissions.