Since you’re a Stuff reader we assume that you’re familiar with Dyson. The electronics company? The one with all the well-engineered vacuum cleaners? Right, we’re on the same page now? Okay now Dyson has, by way of a company-wide announcement by James Dyson, announced that its going to be dumping a whole lot of cash into making its own electric vehicle.
James Dyson just announced to @Dyson employees that we’ve begun work on a battery electric vehicle, due to launch in 2020. pic.twitter.com/yUZNvIsYIi
— Dyson (@Dyson) September 26, 2017
Yes, really. The company plans on investing more than £2 billion (more than R36 billion) on its very own EV, split down the middle — making it about R18 billion reserved for the vehicle’s design and R18 billion for the accompanying battery tech.
The announcement may be recent but the project is not. There are more than 400 engineers already involved and the Dyson EV has been underway for the past two-and-a-half years. But just what the end product is going to look like is anybody’s guess at this point.
Dyson is apparently going for something “radically different” and, like the other products in the company’s lineup, the resulting vehicle isn’t slated to be cheap. It’s also not going to be a speedster, so we’re not really sure what we’re going to get. Poorer, probably, but we’ll look good at the same time.
The move will also give the company one of the weirdest profiles we’ve seen — vacuum cleaners, fans, air purifiers, hair dryers, and… motor vehicles. But they will all have something in common: electric motors and, hopefully, excellent engineering. Let’s see what they’ve got, come 2020.
Source: Dyson (Twitter), Bloomberg