Dyson blast plane for electric car

Home appliance specialist dyson abandons ambitious plans to enter electric car business.

"Our automotive team has developed a fantastic electric car over the last few years, however, due to the current situation in the automotive sector, we don’t see the possibility of selling the product in a commercially profitable way," dyson explained on thursday. The car project will therefore be discontinued.

Dyson, best known for its bagless vacuum cleaners, announced in 2017 that it would develop an electric vehicle and invest around 2.5 billion british pounds (2.8 billion euros) in it. As recently as may, company founder james dyson had said the company was on track for a 2021 market launch and had costs under control.

The british company also decided to move its official headquarters to singapore, where the vehicle would be built. This announcement had been met with criticism in great britain, as james dyson had appeared as a brexit supporter. The company’s headquarters are expected to remain in asia even after the end of the car project, the financial times wrote on friday.

Dyson now emphasized in an e-mail to employees that the failure of the autoplane was "neither due to a defect in the product nor to a failure of the development team". Dyson had also tried to find a buyer for the project – "which unfortunately has been unsuccessful so far". However, the company will benefit from the battery technology developed for the car.

"We will also focus on the huge task of developing solid-state batteries and other enabling technologies in a wide range of areas: sensing, optical systems, robotics, machine learning and AI present significant opportunities for us to seize," wrote james dyson. There was no indication of how much the car project ultimately cost dyson. Among other things, the company had converted a disused airfield in great britain for the project.

At the moment, all the major manufacturers are rushing into business with electric cars and want to bring their models to market in the coming years. You’re spending billions – and it’s already been shown many times how expensive car development can be. Electric car pioneer tesla is still finding it difficult to operate profitably. Several electric car companies financed with chinese money slipped into massive financial problems even before their models hit the market.