Earlier quoted context omitted.
$180K per car to manufacture is really quite expensive!
How did they manage to make it so expensive per car?!
It's Dyson, they reinvent common household items - vacuums, fans, etc - then multiply the price.
The Dyson Battery Electric Vehicle
61–70 of 147 posts
Re: The Dyson Battery Electric Vehicle
#62Vehicles 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…
Could #2 be covered by a car club / rental-by-the-hour kind of thing? ZipCar in the UK is about £8-10/hour with no monthly, so if you're not making the journey frequently that could be suitable? Obviously requires an available car nearby though.
Zipcar isn't profitable because it hasn't really hit critical mass. The zipcar in my street is used maybe only 2 hours per week. It just feels too expensive to use. Also, the fact you can't just park it anywhere when you're done...
I wonder if perhaps some kind of "Pay £100 to have unlimited car use for the month" type scheme might work better?
Re: The Dyson Battery Electric Vehicle
#63I like the part where they project the wind tunnel flowlines on the physical model of the car
That looks like science
Re: The Dyson Battery Electric Vehicle
#64[deleted]
Re: The Dyson Battery Electric Vehicle
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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…
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.
Re: The Dyson Battery Electric Vehicle
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, I think in trying to make an EV fit into a market full of ICE cars has blinded the public, designers, and engineers that a sedan is not the only form factor an EV can take. Something like the Renault Twizy[0] is an excellent use of EV tech. And it's technically classified as a moped or scooter. For now we're constructing 2000kg wagons to move 200kg of cargo and that just doesn't seem efficient. [0] https://en.…
ALL the early green cars looked stupid like this or ultra futuristic and no-one wants them. Tesla came a long and made one that just made a good looking car.
And people have also stupidly convinced themselves that what they need is a petrol powered 4WD SUV that can climb mountains, ford rivers, carry groceries and commute to work. It must also be capable of doing the weekly cross country road trip, apparently. This can all be yours for 84 payments of $500/month.
No one wants EVs because of the same stupid question that gets asked and answered repeatedly, "this would be great, but what do I do when the battery runs out?"
Re: The Dyson Battery Electric Vehicle
#67Vehicles 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…
6kg of wheat is well within pannier/backpack/cargo bike range. 60kg wouldn't be.
If we ever get small "flow" batteries viable then the range problem can be solved cheaply, but even at the moment the 200 mile range is pretty good if you're prepared to stop slightly more often.
Re: The Dyson Battery Electric Vehicle
#68It 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…
I'm not sure electric cars are as deep as motor driven cars and obviously Dyson had the manufacturing of electric motors down to a fine art. I am pretty gutted they couldn't get an economy of scale to make it work, even if they had sold 100 at 250k a pop I think it might have grown and they might have followed the tesla model from luxury down to affordability.
Electric cars are as deep as you make them. I've watched several youtube videos showing disassembling some Zoe components, it's really impressive. Some models use parts of the motor as an inverter during charging.
Re: The Dyson Battery Electric Vehicle
#69The only way to be successful with EVs is to have substantial scale and that scale needs 10’s of billions of dollars, which means public markets or huge private rounds which also means dilution. Many things that are probably unpalatable to Mr.Dyson.
Sadly, I think in trying to make an EV fit into a market full of ICE cars has blinded the public, designers, and engineers that a sedan is not the only form factor an EV can take. Something like the Renault Twizy[0] is an excellent use of EV tech. And it's technically classified as a moped or scooter. For now we're constructing 2000kg wagons to move 200kg of cargo and that just doesn't seem efficient. [0] https://en.…
I think the UK press would compare anything like that to the Sinclair C5, thus forming public opinion, and thus leaving the whole project dead in the water in the UK:
Re: The Dyson Battery Electric Vehicle
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also struggle with the culture of software. From what I've heard from employees, software is looked down on by management and is not really something they 'get'. Things like app connectivity are after thoughts and not core to their products. A good chunk of what makes a Tesla unique is the radically different software and digital user experience. Dyson (the company) are not ready to embrace the fast moving cultu…
> 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 good example of intelligent appliances would be like my Samsung washing machine... It had an error, so I called their support line. They asked me to hold down two buttons simultaneously, then put my phone near the door. It let out a 10s or so digital song, the kind that modems did in the 90s - that gave them an entire diagnostic, age, model etc, and they sent someone around as they knew I couldn't fix it. Pretty amazing stuff.